----
50-foot Inflated Nuclear Missile at UN Treaty Review Conference
U.S. Newswire
24 Apr 12:35
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0424-118.html
To: Assignment and Photo desks
Contact: Tracy Moavero of Peace Action Education Fund, 212-750-5795 Gordon Clark of Peace Action, 202-246-3040 (cell) or 202-862-9740 ext. 3007 (office)
Web site: www.peace-action.org
News Advisory:
Tuesday, April 25, 9-10 a.m.
Dag Hammerskjold Plaza (47th Street and 1st Avenue)
New York City: A 50-foot tall inflated mock nuclear missile will stand in front of the UN building at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza as delegates gather for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference on Tuesday. Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace and disarmament organization, is calling attention to the need for the U.S. government to take a leadership role in nuclear disarmament.
Over 500 people from around the world are expected to participate in the event, including hibakusha (nuclear survivors from Japan), downwinders and indigenous people impacted by nuclear testing, and students. The NPT is a cornerstone of international agreements to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
"The United States is undermining arms control by moving forward with Star Wars and new nuclear weapons production while failing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," said Gordon Clark, the executive director of Peace Action. "These actions are provoking deep suspicions and strong objections from our allies and adversaries alike."
"Thirty years ago the United States along with other nuclear powers agreed to complete nuclear disarmament by ratifying the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT is moving into a crucial phase where it can either become the foundation for disarmament that it was meant to be or a glaring symbol of dangerous inaction and hypocrisy." said Clark. "As the world's sole military superpower, the United States must assume leadership on the nuclear disarmament measures that will address the concerns of nations that might otherwise consider developing nuclear weapons."
The 50-foot tall mock nuclear missiles are touring the country throughout the year as part of Peace Action's campaign to highlight the need for nuclear disarmament. For a complete schedule of the Missile Stop Tour, call Jim Bridgman at Peace Action at 202-862-9740 ext. 3041.
Peace Action is the largest grassroots peace and disarmament organization in the United States.
-0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 04/24 12:35
----
Disarmament of Nuke Powers Sought
April 24, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-UN-Nuclear-Treaty.html
http://cbc.ca/cp/world/000424/w042429.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Russia's recent ratification of two anti-nuclear agreements has lifted some of the pessimism surrounding a major conference to review nuclear disarmament efforts.
But countries without nuclear arms are still expected to press the five declared nuclear powers to commit to disarmament at the four-week Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty conference that begins today.
Nations that disavowed nuclear weapons are frustrated that the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China aren't doing enough to carry out the treaty's goal of a world free of nuclear arms.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be among the first speakers today and is likely to defend Washington's record before the 187 countries that have committed themselves to the treaty.
``Some countries have the quite unrealistic notion that disarmament is something that happens overnight,'' said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. ``The fact is that the United States has led the way among the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race.''
The treaty, which went into force in 1970, represented a bargain between the nuclear haves and have-nots.
In return for a pledge from non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons, the treaty committed nuclear-weapon states to pursue disarmament.
In 1995, when the treaty's 25-year term was set to expire, the United States led the successful campaign to extend it indefinitely, promising ``systematic and progressive efforts'' toward disarmament and a global ban on nuclear tests.
But there is widespread feeling that the efforts have not gone far enough and that the spread of weapons has increased. India and Pakistan have become nuclear states after conducting rival nuclear tests in May 1998.
In addition, the 66-nation Conference on Disarmament, the main disarmament forum, has deadlocked on a new disarmament agenda. There has been no progress on a treaty to cut off production of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. Ten years after the end of the Cold War, thousands of U.S. and Russian warheads remain on ``hair-trigger'' alert.
Disarmament negotiations on a host of issues were virtually gridlocked until the Russian Duma ratified the long-delayed START II treaty to cut nuclear arsenals on April 14. On Friday, the Duma ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the U.S. Senate refused to ratify last year.
Russia hopes the two votes will generate support for its drive to stop the United States from building a missile defense system -- an issue that is likely to feature prominently in the conference. Critics say the U.S. system would trigger a new arms race.
The Russian action ``helps to relieve some of the gloom surrounding some of this conference, and will help to answer some of the criticism with regard to nuclear disarmament,'' said U.N. Undersecretary-General for Disarmament Jayantha Dhanapala.
Some of that criticism is expected to come from a group of moderate countries called the New Agenda Coalition, which consists of South Africa, Brazil, Ireland, Egypt, New Zealand, Mexico and Sweden.
The coalition members have demanded that nuclear-weapon states ``make an unequivocal undertaking'' to quickly eliminate their arsenals.
Nearly 350 grassroots organizations and 42 lawmakers from Britain, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the European Parliament have made similar demands.
-------- activists
Daily Update from the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference available: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/newsinreview/NIR_Index.html
Taking Opportunities
Felicity Hill, Director, WILPF UN Office
While spirits have lifted thanks to Russian ratification of START II and the CTBT, the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference starting today will still be tough. The road to the May 19 consensus text assessing the progress of the past five year period and outlining a forward looking action plan for the next five years will be hampered by tension between the Nuclear Weapon States over NATO expansion and war-waging, as well as plans for a National Missile Defence system in the US. Tension between the 5 nuclear weapon states and the 182 non-nuclear weapon states is also high due to widespread disappointment in the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament since 1995.
But it's not all bad news, as the Canadians point out in their position paper of Feb 1, 2000. Since the last Review Conference, the CTBT was negotiated and 51 countries have ratified, reductions in nuclear weapons has occurred under START I, the UK and France have reduced warhead quantities, types and the number of deployment locations, there has been progress in the establishment of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, the IAEA safeguards have been strengthened as have the Zangger Committees export control mechanisms.
Increased Public Awareness
Other good news relates to increased public awareness of the dangers posted by the Cold War hangover of 36,000 nuclear weapons. A recent 60 Minutes show reached millions of people in the United States and featured an incredulous reporter claiming that "most people don't know this" when presented with the fact that the nuclear wall did not fall with the Berlin Wall. The 60 Minutes programme presented top military personnel from the United States and Russia expressing concern in very strong terms. The former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, General Eugene Habiger said "... the fact that we have not been able to get down to lower and lower levels of nuclear weapons is troubling to me, and it should be troubling to you." (Anyone wanting to view the programme will find the tape and facilities in Conference Room C).
Stars are shining more brightly in the direction of the disarmament cause, with Michael Douglas appearing in capitals and on the cover of magazines and Paul Newman recording a message directed at this Review Conference which will be launched on Chernobyl Day, April 26. Seattle-type actions are not about to happen again on nuclear weapons issues (we did that in the 80's - 1983 - biggest gathering of people on earth) opinion polls over and over again reveal huge majorities in nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states wanting disarmament. What is in the way of democracy?
More than 500 representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will join the 187 states party to the treaty at the United Nations in New York to try to answer this question.
The NGOs are focused on the spectrum of issues the NPT covers: disarmament, safeguarding fissile materials, Nuclear Weapon Free Zones and the so-called peaceful uses of nuclear energy. In particular, NGOs are eager to see what the nuclear weapons states will deliver and how much they can support 182 governments in asserting their majority in the quest for what Article VI of the treaty promises: Disarmament.
The last Review Conference in 1995 was extremely controversial. The decision to make this temporary treaty regime a permanent body in 1995 was a difficult decision that caused fierce splits in both the NGO and governmental communities. Some lament the decision taken in 1995, declaring the treaty an "irrelevant and stillborn" disarmament tool. Others feel that the arms control and disarmament regime was strengthened by the permanence of the treaty.
Whatever your position in 1995, this is 2000, and what lies before us is an opportunity to assess the current political environment, set goals for the future and for the world community to ask what President Nelson Mandela asked in his 1998 General Assembly speech referring to the nuclear weapon states: "Why do they need them anyway?"
Increased Pressure on the Nuclear Weapon States
Let's keep in mind that this is the first Review Conference (RevCon) of the NPT where those who made such a strong case for its indefinite extension in 1995 have an opportunity to show us why, how, and what they will do to illustrate the NPT's usefulness. This is also the first RevCon since the legally and historically significant ICJ decision on the illegality of the threat and use of nuclear weapons was brought down. The authoritative legal interpretation of the NPT's sixth article was: "There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control." Despite the ICJ insistance in 1996 that negotiations should be concluded, getting them off the ground is causing trouble in 2000
NGOs see this RevCon as an opportunity - a once in five year opportunity - not only for discussion but also for decisions. While reductions in numbers are positive signs, we still wait for nuclear weapon states to make the decision to remove nuclear weapons from their strategies and policies. Indeed, we see opposite trends, with dozens of policy statements from the US describing nuclear weapons as "essential" for the "foreseeable future"(see the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy listing of dozens of such quotes and their sources), and similar sentiments expressed by Moscow in their recent draft policy.
Subsidiary Bodies
The Non-Aligned Movement has asserted the necessity for a Subsidiary Body off Main Committee 1 for a focused debate on nuclear disarmament, and another off Main Committee 2 on the Middle East Resolution. Some delegations are making this simple procedural issue, debated and clarified at each PrepCom, unnecessarily complicated.
In addition to speech making, there is a need to get down to the business of formulating text which is too often left to the last minute. The Committee of the Whole and the Main Committees are useful venues for the exchange of views, but need to direct a smaller working group or subsidiary body to craft consensus language. NGOs see obvious benefits in the idea of Subsidiary Bodies and hope for a first draft of the most controversial texts to emerge from the conference, on disarmament and the Middle East.
The speeches in the General Assembly in the coming days by Foreign Ministers and groups such as the Non-Aligned Movement, the European Union and the New Agenda Coalition will give a sense of the terms of the debate to follow. Daily reflection on the governmental meeting as well as news and views from the NGOs will be provided in this daily News In Review which will also be available on the Reaching Critical Will website
http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org
----
Ellsberg Hoped for More Impact
APRIL 24, 14:22 EDT
By LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS74291K00
WASHINGTON (AP) - As thousands of demonstrators screamed against the war in Vietnam on a Saturday in October in 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara watched grimly from his office window.
One window over, watching the protesters and glancing at McNamara, was Daniel Ellsberg, a midlevel defense official who was helping compile the comprehensive 47-volume history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Over several years as his thinking evolved, Ellsberg had moved from trying to help the United States win in Vietnam to trying to find a way to end U.S. involvement in a war he had come to believe was unwinnable and immoral.
``Initially it was how to win it, stalemate it or avoid defeat,'' Ellsberg said, in an interview with Associated Press Television News at his Washington apartment last week, just short of a quarter century from the communist victory. ``But when I came back (from Vietnam) in '67 it was how to end it and it was an obsession.''
Ellsberg had arrived at the Pentagon that Saturday by walking side-by-side from the Washington monument with the anti-war demonstrators. He then used his Defense Department pass to reach McNamara's office next door to his own workspace.
``I was both outside and inside on the same day,'' he said, as he sat in his living room, its shelves filled with books on the Vietnam era.
Four years after the 1967 March on the Pentagon, Ellsberg used his insider's access to copy and release to newspapers the most potent anti-war weapon at his disposal, the 7,000-page top secret history of the war. It became known as ``the Pentagon Papers.''
Looking back on it, he thinks that publication of the Pentagon Papers may not have shortened the war by much. But he says he is convinced that President Richard Nixon's hostile reaction surely did.
Ellsberg asserts that because of private information, ``I knew, what almost no one else outside the White House knew, that Nixon was not going to get us out of war, that he was going to continue and expand the war.''
He says he hoped that once published the Pentagon Papers would show a long pattern of presidential deception and lying about Vietnam and that it would ``strengthen belief in what I was saying ..., that this president was lying the same way his predecessors did (and was) determined not to lose in Vietnam no matter how many people had to die to save his face.''
``But that didn't end the war; I didn't expect it to, and if anything it had less effect than I expected,'' he said.
What it did do, he said, was prod Nixon ``into protecting the policy of expanding and continuing the war by taking criminal efforts to shut me up.''
In 1971 burglars tied to the White House broke into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had been treating Ellsberg.
Ellsberg says there's no doubt they were looking for information to use to blackmail him into silence.
He contends that the burglary led to the White House cover-up and eventually Watergate and Nixon's resignation. And it was Nixon's departure from office that shortened the war, Ellsberg said.
Ellsberg said that while he strongly believed that the war was a disaster, ``I was not an admirer of the communists then, or now ...''
``I haven't gone back because I dislike their regime so much,'' he said. ``I can admire their courage. But that certainly doesn't mean that they are a good country, certainly not a democratic country.''
Ellsberg, vigorous and animated at 69, is about halfway through a memoir of his Vietnam and Pentagon Paper experiences. The Fielding break-in led to dismissal of charges against him for disclosing government secrets. The court ruled that Ellsberg had been the target of outrageous government misconduct. Since then he campaigned against nuclear proliferation and has been arrested in anti-nuclear protests.
Last week he was in the streets again, joining protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
``I was at Connecticut and H for eight hours, blockading, starting at six in the morning,'' he said. ``It reminded me of May Day 1971. They arrested 12,000 people that day.''
----
100 arrested at Belgian NATO base as NPT conference starts
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 23:16:05 +0200
Kleine Brogel (Belgium), April 24 2000 - As the review conference for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) starts today at the UN headquarters in New York, over 300 peace campaigners held a non-violent direct action at the NATO nuclear weapon base of Kleine Brogel in the north of Belgium. During the colorful protest 100 'citizens inspectors' were arrested as they entered the alerted NATO base in search for evidence to prove the illegal deployment of 10 US B-61 nuclear weapons. The presence of these US nuclear bombs is probably the best kept public secret in Belgium, as NATO continues to oppose any disclosure of information for both Members of Parliament, press and the public.
The disarmament campaigners demand the immediate withdrawal of the estimated 150 US nuclear weapons in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey as an important step towards complete nuclear disarmament. The sharing of the US nuclear weapons with other NATO allies is in breach with Article I and II of the NPT, while the political nuclear deterrent is also violating Article VI which committed all parties to the NPT to work towards a Treaty Banning all nuclear weapons. They also oppose and condemn the US plans to breach the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty as a new threat encouraging a new nuclear arms race.
Today the protestors were joined once again by Belgian Members of Parliament and famous authors, while actors took the lead of the theatrical demonstration. The organisers, For Mother Earth and the War Resisters International, have been campaigning for several years against the 'preparation of war crimes and crimes against humanity through NATO's nuclear deterrent'. The spokespeople refer to the July 1996 historic ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The World Court concluded that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was found to be in violation with international law, while also finding binding obligations for a treaty banning all nuclear weapons.
All nuclear weapons have to be abolished, as demanded by the global network Abolition 2000, gathering almost 2000 NGO's around the planet. For decades a large majority of states and the public opinion have demanded such a global treaty banning over 35,000 nuclear warheads still remaining a daily threat to humanity and the natural environment.
Contacts, pictures and info for press
* In Belgium
For Mother Earth - Forum voor Vredesactie - http://www.motherearth.org
Pol D'Huyvetter +32-495-28 02 59 E-mail pol@motherearth.org
Hans Lammerant +32-495-47 35 25
--------
Failing China's dissidents
Washington Times
April 24, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-200042418750.htm
The United Nations Rights Commission has failed the people of China by blocking a motion to censure the Chinese government's human rights record. The move sends a message that will be felt in jail cells and in underground churches in a country where human rights groups say 5,000 Falun Gong members are in re-education camps for practicing their spiritual meditation and breathing techniques. During this last year, Christian pastors have been imprisoned there for meeting in small house churches, and the government and its security forces have imprisoned, tortured and beaten political dissidents.
The State Department had predicted this year would be different - that the United States would finally be able to convince the commission to speak out against such brutalities. Despite the fact that China's human rights situation had seriously deteriorated throughout the year, those who could have swung the censure vote were noncommittal at best.
"In order to sway the countries that might have been able to swing the votes, and prevent the foot dragging by the European Union, it required more lobbying," Curt Gehring, spokesman for Amnesty International told The Washington Times. "Had the EU come on board the same time as the U.S. did, and had they been involved in their own lobbying, it would have made a significant difference." The president could have also stepped up his efforts, he said.
As it was, the European Union refused to co-sponsor the motion with the United States - an action that brought criticism even from the State Department. Human Rights Watch agreed that White House involvement could have swung key support in a decision where 12 countries abstained from even voting. South Korea, Rwanda, Argentina, Ecuador and Chile were abstainees who could have been talked into censuring China had the White House worked a little harder, Ken Roth, the executive director for the rights group, told the New York Times. In 1995, when President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were involved in making personal phone calls to the key players in the vote, the United States was able to rally enough support to block China's resolution to prevent discussion of their record.
China took advantage of the executive apathy to hold its own closed-door meetings with countries such as Australia and Canada, who had previously admitted to having concerns about the country's human rights record. Neither country ended up co-sponsoring the United States resolution.
Part of the problem is the product of a resistance to critique within the United Nations itself, said Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institution, a pro-life lobbying group working full time in the U.N. headquarters in New York.
"The U.N. is very reluctant to criticize member states. There is an unofficial member rule for criticizing member states within the building. [Nongovernmental organizations] can be condemned for doing so," he said in an interview. This time around, he said, there was no real push to lobby the other countries to censure the Chinese for their bad behavior. "This administration is in the hip pockets of the Chinese," he said.
Noble efforts to climb out of that sticky place were made by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who traveled to Geneva last month to try to persuade the commission to censure China, and Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Harold Koh, who lobbied delegates in Geneva. This might have swayed the vote to be the closest it has been since 1995 - with a 22 to 18 vote to back the Chinese.
For the persecuted Tibetan monk, the imprisoned pastor and the tortured political dissident, close is not enough. The European Union and this year's U.S. presidential candidates must prepare now for next year's vote.
-------- imf
Violence for peace
Boulder activists find mayhem in D.C.
by Brian Klocke (Editorial@boulderweekly.com)
http://www.boulderweekly.com/coverstory.html
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Jonis wanted world peace. So the Boulder High School student traveled to the nation's capital with other protesters "to celebrate community and help Third World countries fight against corporate oppression."
For his trouble, police trampled Jonis with horses and broke his finger.
"We were down by the White House and saw a van of treasurers (IMF/World Bank delegates) coming at us and we decide to block it," Jonis said.
In good Boulder-style protest fashion, Jonis and his friend Arth Spengler sat in front of the van so it couldn't proceed. The two teens believed their message about starving kids outweighed the need for bureaucrats in the van to be on time.
But the cops weren't impressed, and were in no mood for peaceable expressions of civil disobedience. To police, Jonis and Arth were obstacles to be moved before the work day could end.
"What they did is the cops would stand in front of the van and beat us with their batons, push us, shove us around," Jonis said. "They started using horses and the horses would trample on us. We were sitting there peacefully. A horse trampled on my finger and it's broken."
It could have been worse, Arth said. At one point, the boys lives were in danger as the van refused to stop for them.
"The van started to run over me and all of the protesters got really pissed off because they didn't want to see some kid get run over," Arth said. "Then the cops started beating us and repeatedly hitting me in the knee and saying, 'Get back.' I said, 'I'm trying.' They kept hitting me in the knees."
When adult protesters tried to help the boys, police acted swiftly to keep them away.
"A woman was pepper sprayed in the eyes and was beaten," Jonis said. "She was unconscious and kept being pushed into the pile. I was dragged out of the crowd and right away some street medics came up to me and treated my finger."
Similar altercations were common. Volunteer street medics like Doc Rosen kept peace protesters patched up. Rosen of the Colorado Medical Community for Human Rights, is a veteran activist and street medic from Denver. Rosen calls the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO "the three largest health hazards on the planet."
Rosen's organization sent a group of 16 Colorado medics to make sure that protesters would be safe. They trained 200 more volunteers. The Colorado team alone treated more than 300 protesters on Monday and Sunday. Head traumas from batons were common among an array of conditions resulting from police throwing protesters against concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets. Adverse reactions to tear gas and pepper spray were also treated.
Despite the abuse, Rosen remained inspired by the protesters, especially the youth. Rosen believes that today's young people are much more aware than older generations give them credit for. "The youth of America rock!" he said.
The conflict
An estimated 30,000 protesters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, from more than 50 countries, convened on Washington April 16. Most shared a common desire to end corporate domination of people and the planet-a goal to achieve global justice.
Known as "A16" and "A17," the two days of protest were the culmination of more than a week-long series of demonstrations, teach-ins, movies, forums, debates and planning meetings by activists. A day-long forum on the negative effects of globalization offered a who's who of notable scholars, activists and writers, including: Vandana Shiva, activist and author of Biopiracy; economist Herman Daly; Kevin Danaher, activist and editor of Corporations are Gonna Get Your Mama; Jerry Mander, editor of The Case Against the Global Economy; Kenyan Njoki Njehu, author of Fifty Years is Enough; David Korten, author of The Post Corporate World; Ralph Nader of Public Citizen and candidate for U.S. President; and many others.
People were so energized by the passion of the speakers that most of the 1,000 who attended the conference stayed until it ended-more than 12 hours after it began.
On Saturday, there was a debate between IMF/World Bank officials and Vandana Shiva and Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South. Like the debate and teach-ins in Seattle, corporate media mostly ignored these important educational events.
Continuing in the spirit of the "Battle in Seattle"-and in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.-the A16 protesters were committed to creative nonviolence and civil disobedience. They came from a variety of religious, social, political and professional backgrounds. The many spirited chants, dances, puppet creations and street performances created a festival like atmosphere on Sunday, despite routine altercations with police.
The whole affair represents a renewed energy in social protest and a global revolution that "affirms life over money," says Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange.
World Bank 101
The IMF and World Bank are the two major global institutions that manage the global capitalist economy, founded in 1944 and based in Washington D.C. They are mostly influenced by corporate and governmental elites in the United States. Like the World Trade Organization, the institutions are funded by public tax dollars. Yet they're often accused of operating secretively and not being accountable to the people they profess to serve-the poor. Activists accuse the Bank and the IMF of furthering environmental destruction, displacing indigenous populations, and increasing global economic inequality among individuals and nations.
Much of the criticism is leveled at "structural adjustment programs," known as SAPs. SAPs force developing nations to sell off public services and government-owned enterprises to foreign investors. They force foreign governments to cut spending on social service programs, and to develop export-oriented economies. Such mandates weaken Third World economies and promote social decay, while increasing the profits of transnational corporations that provide cheap goods for consumers in the developed world.
Police gear up
Many of the local papers reported that the D.C. Metro Police recently bought $1 million worth of new riot gear. They received months of training and studied tapes of last year's Seattle protests. They also established a "security perimeter"-a 90-block area that kept vehicles and pedestrians from getting anywhere near the IMF and World Bank buildings. All mailboxes within the militarized police perimeter were removed. George Washington University was closed to outside guests. Several subway stops were also closed. Protest organizers were often followed, and their communications were monitored. More than 2,000 officers were assigned to the protests, from agencies including ATF, FBI, Secret Service, DC Metro Police, U.S. Marshalls and the National Guard.
Protest organizers offered activists training for nonviolence, medical treatment and consensus decision-making techniques. Activists were linked up with affinity groups, which each agreed to the following guidelines: 1) We will use no violence, physical or verbal, towards any person. 2) We will carry no weapons. 3) We will not bring nor use alcohol or illegal drugs. 4) We will not destroy property.
The fourth category, however, came with an asterisk. Cop barricades, after all, are "property." And they were everywhere. So the exception to the fourth rule was that barricades could be destroyed if erected to prevent activists from exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. That exception, essential to peaceable assembly, was one ingredient for angering police. When barricades came down, police reacted with force and violence ensued.
Raid and seize
Early on, police made it perfectly clear they would be in charge. Early Saturday morning, the police staged an unprovoked 'pre-emptive strike' against the protests by raiding and closing the organizing hub of the protesters, as well as seizing all supplies that were stored there.
"The police department came with about 75 officers and members of the fire department to conduct an emergency fire code inspection Saturday morning," said an attorney with the Midnight Special Law Collective. "There is a reason it was on Saturday morning. Any fire inspection could have taken place any day of the week. They waited for Saturday morning when the courts were closed and the judges were not available and the lawyers were out of their offices, which means that anyone that wanted to seek a legal remedy for the seizure of all this stuff was barred from that."
In their "fire inspection," police seized protest props, puppets and banners, and much-needed medical supplies. Police told the media they seized all supplies that could be used by protesters to start fires or build Molotov cocktails.
"The D.C. police have now showed that Washington is safe from puppets," the Midnight Special attorney said. "The police claimed that on the convergence property we also had supplies for Molotov cocktails. Yes they really found bins of bottles because activists recycle everything. They found rags, and they found paint thinner. The only Molotov cocktail that was in there was in the minds of the police."
After the seizure of the convergence center, local churches and other institutions around the area opened their doors to the activists.
Also on Saturday, more than 600 protesters at a demonstration against the prison industrial complex were arrested-including a student of New Vista High School in Boulder.
The United States currently imprisons more than two million of its citizens. A report released by the Eisenhower foundation, titled Millennium Breach, reveals that states spend more per year on prisons than on higher education. It also reports that the rate of incarceration of African American men in the U.S. is four times higher than in South Africa under apartheid.
Fighting back
By 5:30 Sunday morning, protesters had found a new convergence hub. They built more puppets, invented some chants and found their way downtown. By 7 am, some 15 intersections had been blocked off by activists.
Carolyn Bninski, of Boulder's Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, helped block a major intersection with the help of other Boulder residents. They chanted "Corporate greed, we say no! IMF has got to go!"
Bninski was locked arm and arm with other protesters who reinforced the human chain with tubing that's tough to break or cut through.
"We're here to protest the exploitation of the poorest people on the planet," Bninski said. "My hope is to build a new international system of cooperation where every country has the ability to determine its own economy, its own future. One where the developed countries are no longer allowed to exploit and use the resources of the Third World." Bninski was arrested Monday, along with 700 other protesters.
Mark Thompson, a Boulder resident, took to the D.C. streets in protest with his wife Diana, a teacher.
"I am hoping in the long term that we will get people who remain in the so-called mainstream to start analyzing our economic structures, our political structures, and realize that the institutions we have created in the United States and throughout the world are not benefiting the many. They're benefiting the few," Thompson said.
Provoked by police
At least two near-lethal weapons-tear gas and pepper spray-were used on nonviolent protesters early Sunday morning. As in Seattle, the police became more violent after the big day of protests. Throughout Monday, police used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets against activists. They beat protesters harshly with batons. The public, seeing only soundbites on the evening news, had little information about the volume of violence inflicted by police during the protests.
The mainstream press
Many of the protesters I spoke with were upset by the distorted nature of the mainstream press coverage. "I was listening to the radio and the TV, and the spin that the corporate media is putting on this is so ridiculous," said Joan Flynn of Environmental Video. "They actually had the police chief saying that we had to go into the convergence house (the protest resource hub) because they had 'implements' that they could use to make pepper spray. And those 'implements' were garlic, onions and cayenne pepper. Now, I'm a cook and I know what they use those things for. They said they could use them for the purpose of criminal activity. How many guns are in people's homes? Are the police going to walk into every home and say we want your guns because they could be used for criminal activity? This is absurd, totally absurd.
"They're saying that they can use the paint thinner that they're using to make their lovely puppets, for Molatov cocktails," Flynn continued. "The commercial media is just sucking this up. It's hideous, absolutely hideous. They ran a PR piece produced by the World Bank on CNN this morning and their response was that the protesters simply say 'I don't think so.' It was absurd."
Routine stories on corporate broadcasts, and in corporate newspapers, sobbed about how IMF/World Bank officials felt their good names and reputations were under attack by protesters.
"That was absolutely the spin on CNN this morning," Flynn said.
Controlling spin was clearly an objective of IMF/World Bank officials in weeks preceding the meetings. Boulder Weekly, and all other alternative weeklies that applied, were flatly denied press credentials to cover the meetings. The rejection letters contained no explanations, and IMF/World Bank officials have refused to return phone calls to alternative media reporters and editors. The D.C. branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is looking into it.
Kevin Danaher, of Global Exchange, analyzed the political economy of corporate media Sunday night at the Independent Media Center.
The Independent Media Center was established, in large part, by the staff of Boulder's own Free Speech TV. Future media centers are being planned for the protests coinciding with the upcoming Republican convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic convention in Los Angeles.
"It is important to get out a clear understanding of what corporate media is," Danaher said. "It is not information media. It is not entertainment media. It is commercial media. The products being sold by corporate media are not the tires and the toothpaste in the ads. The products are us-we are being sold...The corporate media is the marketing of human minds, which is far more insidious in fact (than slavery), because most people don't feel themselves being marketed. They think, 'Oh, I am free to change the channel.' You're free to change the channel to some more commercial drivel, with an occasional off shot of reality.
"What the Indy Media Center represents is the best of what information media should be about, helping people to understand day to day reality and lead their lives in a less fearful, more loving way," he continued. "And that's part of this revolution, and it's going to move forward to higher and higher levels all the time."
They've only just begun
Activists in Washington aren't only concerned with the IMF/World Bank fiasco. Many were the same protesters who stood up for American sovereignty in Seattle last year. And most are committed to exposing all major sources of world injustice. Their work, they hope, has only begun.
"It is imperative that we join our voices with those in every corner of the world who struggle for human dignity, for a healthy, just and fulfilling life," said Nadine Bloch, organizer for the Mobilization for Global Justice. "We do this in many ways, through an organizing process that is inclusive and not hierarchical... Despite the scare tactics, the threats, the harassment, the surveillance, the helicopters overhead, the raid of our workshop space and our teaching area, the tear gas rubber bullets and pepper spray, we will not be silent!"
Danaher also believes that the movement needs to be broader than simply protesting the IMF and World Bank. He believes humankind is at the brink of a global revolution.
"People all around the planet are sick and tired of seeing Mother Nature destroyed and seeing 30,000 children a day dying from the effects of hunger," Danaher said. There are "children dying from diseases where the vaccine costs only 10 cents. There are children going permanently mentally retarded from a lack of iodine. In your whole life you need only a spoonful of iodine, it's a trace element. Iodized salt is enough to eliminate this and it costs pennies. So this is totally unacceptable, and it's been going on for decades now, and these wealthy guys, these millionaire bankers, are always coming out with propaganda and rhetoric about how they're going to fix it. They don't fix it and it gets worse. Their own data shows that the inequality is worse now than it was 50 years ago when they started. So we're saying enough! Those institutions are either going to change their policies or those institutions are going to come down."
Oronto Douglas, of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, was among hundreds of foreign protesters who had survived physical torture and tyranny.
"The first decade of this century will be a decade of protests, a decade of the struggle for liberation, a decade of the attempt by humanity to resist that resistance by international financial institutions and those corporations that have refused to understand humanity's cry for justice," Douglas says. "Expect more protests to happen whether in Nigeria or in the United States, whether in England or Pakistan. There will be protests until humanity decides that there is justice."
If there was any doubt, it's been erased: Colorado is an activist state. The following are some of the local organizations that sent members to the IMF/World Bank protests last weekend:
Free Speech TV
Activist Media Project
Denver Peace and Justice Center
Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center
Colorado Medical Community for Human Rights
Jubilee 2000 Colorado Campaign
Web resources:
Global Exchange: www.globalexchange.org Mobilization for Global Justice: www.a16.org
Independent Media Center: www.indymedia.org
Fifty Years is Enough: www.50years.org
Jubilee 2000 USA: www.jubilee2000usa.org
Corporate Watch: www.corpwatch.org
International Forum on Globalization: www.ifg.org
International Monetary Fund: www.imf.org
World Bank: www.worldbank.org
-------- india / pakistan
BARC 'digs up' a controversy
By Our Special Correspondent
http://www.the-hindu.com/2000/04/24/stories/02240002.htm
JAIPUR, APRIL 23. What had started as a dream for the villagers of Sanawada in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan a few years ago may soon turn into a nightmare. They were told that rich mineral wealth, buried deep in their fields, would bring them overnight prosperity. Now, it dawns that Sanawada may be chosen as the dumping ground for India's nuclear waste.
The village, in Pokhran tehsil, is about 50 km from the country's two nuclear test sites. Since 1997, 24 holes - 150 metres to 500 metres deep - have been dug in 17 plots in the fields of Sanawada. These drilling operations pose a new threat to environment and people, as if the potential dangers from the two earlier nuclear explosions were not enough.
According to Jaipur-based activist, Ms. Kavita Srivastava, a hole is now being dug by jumbo-sized drilling machines of the Mining Exploration Corporation Ltd. (MECL) at the behest of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). MECL is likely to wrap up the operations by May - in time for Pokhran- II's second anniversary.
Yet, no one from the authorities is confirming as to what is in store for Sanawada. ``I am not aware of any nuclear waste burial site at Pokhran. As such, the country has no immediate problem with nuclear waste,'' Dr. G.R. Srinivasan of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board in Bombay told The Hindu, when contacted on telephone.
Dr. Srinivasan noted that India had only 10 nuclear reactors, and waste disposal was not yet a problem unlike in the U.S., which has 108 reactors generating a huge quantity of nuclear waste. ``For another 20-30 years India has no such problem,'' he affirmed.
When MECL started its operations in 1997, the authorities had told the villagers that prospecting was being carried out for mineral deposits. No public opinion was sought even as an agreement was signed between K.Ballu, Director, Fuel Processing and Nuclear Waste Management, BARC, and Mr. K.P. Agarwal of MECL.
The agreement was in two phases. The 1997 pact was for drilling holes of 150 metres depth. Between 1997 and early 1999 MECL bore 20 such holes. In fact, geologists from Khetri (Hindustan Copper Ltd.) had carried out a survey of Sanawada soil back in June 1995. This was followed by an aerial survey. The villagers were not taken into confidence but were told that they would get rich as their land had extremely valuable deposits of stones and minerals.
Then the big machines rolled out. People were forewarned that they should not sell their land titles to anybody.
After the 1999 agreement, another MECL unit moved into Pokhran. The new agreement required the MECL to do a survey 500 metres deep into the earth for ``availability of hard soil'' in the Pokhran tehsil area, so that BARC could deposit its waste there.
Anti-nuclear activists, who claim to have seen the document, told The Hindu that the agreement spoke of keeping the whole exercise under wraps. Not that people did not protest. The first time, when they opposed the arrival of big machines, the local administration intervened. The fear of reprisal and promises of eventual prosperity deterred them from further expressing resentment.
In August 1999, it was announced that nuclear wastes would be deposited in sites located in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The villagers first came across the horrifying fact when the local Sarvodaya leader, Mr. Balkishen Thanvi, and anti- nuclear activists - Dr. Sanghamitra Gadekar and others - visited the place on March 15 this year. Their visit led to the formation of a committee on March 23 for an agitation against the drilling. The following day, the drilling was stopped.
Mr. Balkishen Thanvi had written a letter to 60 persons including the Prime Minister and the Rajasthan Chief Minister based on the facts he had collected from the area seeking transparency in the exercise going on in Sanawada. He had set a deadline for the authorities to reply within April 15, or else - he had warned them - it would be taken as an acceptance that digging was being done for BARC.
Anti-nuclear activists from Jaipur, Jodhpur and Vedchi in Gujarat are once again in Sanawada hoping to unravel the hidden agenda the authorities have for the village.
-------- iraq
Congressman Hall's Remarks on Humanitarian Aid to Iraq
(Calls for more effective response to suffering of Iraqi people)
http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/iraq0424.htm
April 24, 2000 - Congressman Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio, says Iraq's people are suffering terribly and he has called on the U.S. for a more effective response to their suffering. Hall visited Iraq April 16-20, touring hospitals, schools, clinics and water-treatment plants in Baghdad, Basra, Babylon, Samawah and Nasiriyah.
"I left Iraq convinced that a great deal more could be done to address its people's humanitarian needs, and I am determined to do all I can to persuade the U.S. Government to take these steps," he said April 24 at a press briefing on his trip.
Hall, who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Task Force on Hunger, co-founder on the steering committee of the Congressional Friends of Human Rights Monitors and is chairman of the Congressional Hunger Center, said delays in the delivery of humanitarian supplies and equipment to Iraq must stop. He also said he was troubled by Iraq's recent attempt to reject Canada's offer of a significant contribution to UNICEF's operations there.
Hall called upon the government of Iraq and other governments to allow more humanitarian workers to go to Iraq to deal with the health and economic crises there.
The Congressman said one in six children in Iraq shows signs of malnutrition and 10 percent of the children in the areas of the country controlled by Saddam Hussein are classified as "wastie" or those who have actually stopped growing. He noted that in Iraq, the "infant mortality rate is higher than any other place in the world."
Additionally, he said the Iraqi population has been exposed to the six major diseases that cause mortality as well as polio and cholera and he urged the surrounding countries to help because it is in their self-interest to protect themselves from these deadly diseases. Hall also called for the World Health Organization or some other independent scientific body to find out why there is high incidence of leukemia in southern Iraq.
Hall said "sanctions clearly have played a role in Iraqis' suffering," but "it would be irresponsible to lift the sanctions." He expressed concern that Iraq continues to pose a threat to its neighbors with its weapons of mass destruction and suggested that if Iraq eliminated its weapons of mass destruction and kept its promises made after the Gulf war to abide by the U.N. resolutions, "perhaps that would prompt good faith measures by the United Nations -- such as adding a sunset provision to some of the economic sanctions."
Hall, who is a long-time humanitarian activist, was in 1998 and 1999 nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his hunger legislation and for his proposal for a Humanitarian Summit in the Horn of Africa.
He has worked actively to improve human rights conditions around the world, especially in the Philippines, East Timor, Paraguay, South Korea, Romania, and the former Soviet Union. In 1983 he founded the Congressional Friends of Human Rights Monitors. He was the principal U.S. nominator of East Timor Bishop Carlos Belo, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize.
Following is the text of Hall's remarks:
(Begin text)
Congressman Tony P. Hall U.S. House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515 April 24, 2000
HALL CALLS FOR SMARTER U.N. SANCTIONS THAT SPARE INNOCENT IRAQIS
Suffering -- especially among children -- is real and severe, says first US official to examine Iraq's humanitarian situation since Gulf War
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, today called for an end to efforts to demonize Iraq's people - and for a more effective response to their suffering from officials charged with supervising Iraq's purchase of humanitarian supplies. He also said that lifting sanctions at this point would be irresponsible.
Hall visited Iraq April 16-20, touring hospitals, schools, clinics and water-treatment plants in Baghdad, Basra, Babylon, Samawah and Nasiriyah. He was accompanied in Iraq by representatives of the Red Crescent, Red Cross, UNICEF, and others and met with aid workers, Western diplomats, and Iraq's Minister of Health. His statement on his trip to Iraq follows:
"Iraq's people are suffering terribly, and it was heartbreaking to see their pain firsthand. I left Iraq convinced that a great deal more could be done to address its people's humanitarian needs, and I am determined to do all I can to persuade the U.S. Government to take these steps.
"But, like the majority of American citizens, I remain concerned about the military threat Iraq continues to pose to its neighbors and the world -- and convinced that until progress is made on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, lifting sanctions would be irresponsible.
"I wish that I could support lifting sanctions: many religious leaders, aid workers, and other people I respect oppose them. I am troubled, though, that some opponents of sanctions don't focus as much attention on Iraq's government as I believe they should.
"While sanctions clearly have played a role in Iraqis' suffering, though, lifting them would not provide much comfort to citizens there. If Iraq's government would show it is serious about easing its people's suffering - instead of using their problems to support its bid to end sanctions - it would be easier for me to see sanctions as the primary culprit. Or, if Iraq would show good faith in keeping the promises it made at the end of the Gulf War, perhaps that would prompt good faith measures by the United Nations -- such as adding a sunset provision to some of the economic sanctions.
"I am hopeful that Iraq is realizing the long-term human cost of its strategies, and I will look for signs that it will set more humane priorities in the near future. For example, trying to mask dual-use or other prohibited items by inserting them into contracts for humanitarian goods is counterproductive. Iraq's government knows those efforts only result in the delay of needed food, medicine and other humanitarian items. I was also troubled by Iraq's recent attempt to reject Canada's offer of a significant contribution to UNICEF's operations there.
"That said, I also believe the U.N.'s Sanctions Committee, and particularly its U.S. representatives, ought to use much better judgment. For example, American officials tell me that only a small percentage of items raise security concerns -- but those concerns hold up entire shipments of humanitarian goods. Surely, the U.N. could employ a line-item veto approach -- allowing what is permitted under the sanctions, barring what is not, and paying only for what is sent to Iraq. If the U.N. Sanctions Committee's top priority were humanitarian, as I believe it should be, this would be a way to quickly resolve many of the causes of Iraqis' difficulties.
"I appreciate the high priority my country puts on security considerations. But there are humanitarian standards that are equally central to America's character. There also are political realities that should make us think twice about the wisdom of a crippled nation in this dangerous Middle East neighborhood. I hope that U.S. policymakers can better balance these competing concerns and redouble efforts to heal this festering sore.
"There are some confidence-building measures the United States could take, to demonstrate its concern for Iraqis' suffering. For example, I hope our government will support a scientific study by the World Health Organization of the effects of depleted uranium (DU) and other potential pollutants on Iraqi civilians -- who are suffering very high rates of leukemia. Not only could work like this engage representatives of the international community and Iraqis in constructive work together; it also could yield health benefits for American veterans of the Gulf War as well as Iraqi civilians.
"I fear that no matter how quickly sanctions are lifted, the future of most of the people I met in Iraq will be bleak. That is because its children are in bad shape, with a quarter of them underweight and one in 10 wasting away because of hunger and disease. The leading cause of childhood death, diarrhea, is 11 times more prevalent in Iraq than elsewhere - and while polio has been wiped out throughout the Mideast, it has returned to plague Iraq's people. Schools and water systems -- the infrastructure any nation's future depends upon -- are decrepit and hospitals lack basic medicine and equipment. Ordinary civilians have exhausted their resources and their health trying to survive on $2-6 per month.
"The country's isolation has made it easy for some to demonize its people, and for Iraq's government to denounce Westerners. Blocking Iraqis' access to outside information contributes nothing to positive change, and this policy's result is innocent people who seem angry and past hoping for a different life. A Christian minister working in Iraq summed up the situation this way: 'The children in Iraq no longer know how to dream,' he said.
"It will take Iraqi people a generation to recover from their present situation. Sanctions imposed by the United Nations are partly to blame, but it is the stalemate - and not the sanctions - that causes Iraqis to suffer. I want to see all concerned look harder for ways to rebuild the confidence needed to end this stalemate.
"Finally, I want to commend the superb work that UNICEF, Care, and other organizations are doing under difficult circumstances. I particularly appreciated the efforts of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Society in helping to make my trip a success."
Hall first became involved in humanitarian work when he served in the Peace Corps 30 years ago. In recent years, he has focused his legislative and other efforts on fighting hunger and the other problems that affect the poor of the United States and other nations and has recently visited North Korea, Sierra Leone, Laos, Burma, Cambodia and Sudan.
(End text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Dep't of State. Web site: usinfo.state.gov)
-------- israel
AWACS to China: Israel's Costly Mistake
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page A24
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/004l-042400-idx.html
Re "Rough Undercurrents for Jiang; Visiting Chinese Leader Hits Waves in Attempt to Deepen Ties With Israel" [news story, April 15]: For reasons of both morality and self-interest, Israel should not sell AWACS to China. The costs of such a sale far outweigh the benefits.
Israel and Taiwan have many similarities: They are both small, diplomatically isolated, wealthy democracies that depend on the United States. Over the past half-century, their proud and well-educated citizens have worked hard to fend off strong enemies that want to subjugate them. Israel cannot morally ignore the certainty that the AWACS sale will empower the authoritarian and jingoistic China to overrun a fellow democracy.
Regarding calculated interest, the sale may come back to haunt Israel and the United States. China has sold missiles and nuclear technology to states--such as Iran, Iraq and Libya--that pose a security threat to Israel.
Further, this move antagonizes the United States, Israel's most crucial supporter; the United States provides $3 billion in aid annually and is called upon to provide another $17 billion for Israel's peace agreement with Syria.
Carrying out the contract may show Israel to be a reliable arms supplier. But the profits from the $250 million sale can never pay for decreased U.S. support, increased threat to Israel's own security and Israel's tattered reputation as a democracy.
VINCENT WEI-CHENG
WANG
Richmond
-------- japan
Japanese Nuclear Reactor Shuts Down
APRIL 24, 07:24 EDT
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7422TP00
TOKYO (AP) - A nuclear reactor at a research plant northeast of Tokyo shut down automatically Monday after its fuel rods malfunctioned during an output increase, officials said.
The reactor at the state-run nuclear research institute at Oarai, 590 miles northeast of Tokyo, shut down while its output was being raised from 500 kilowatts to 3.5 megawatts, according to the Science and Technology Agency.
No radiation leaked outside the facility, agency spokesman Akihiro Myoga said. The cause of the malfunction was being investigated.
The reactor at Oarai is designed for the study of nuclear fuels and is not for power generation.
More than 400 residents were exposed to radiation on Sept. 30, 1999, at the JCO Co. plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo. The nuclear accident - Japan's worst - killed one worker and seriously sickened two others.
-------- npt
Global Weapons Review Opens at UN Today
U.S. Newswire
24 Apr 10:00
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0424-104.html
World Attention Focuses on New York as Global Nuclear Weapons Review Opens at United Nations Today
To: Assignment Desk Contact: Steve Kent, 617-283-5047 or Jordan Benjamin, 212-584-5018
NEW YORK, April 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today leaders from 186 nations will assemble at the United Nations to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT 2000). Also being held today is an independent international briefing with nuclear experts and newsmakers who are gathering in New York to assess new developments in nuclear arms control and the possible consequences of planned U.S. actions. Russia's decision to ratify START II and the CTBT places the global onus on an increasingly isolated United States to demonstrate compliance with the NPT, the Anti-Ballis tic Missile Treaty and other nuclear treaties.
Today's luncheon briefing, April 24, 2010: A Look At Our Nuclear Future, will review two scenarios for the future: one in which the United States asserts its leadership for nuclear disarmament; the other in which global arms control efforts collapse and rampant nuclear proliferation results.
WHEN: Monday, April 24 from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m.
WHERE: Regal UN Plaza Hotel Ballroom, One UN Plaza, 44th St. between 1st & 2nd Aves.
Expert Panelists and Speakers -- Jacqueline Cabasso, director, Western States Legal Foundation; -- Merav Datan, program director, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War; -- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH); -- Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., former special representative of the president for arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament (1994-97) -- Commander Robert Green (ret.), British Royal Navy (1962-82) -- Jack Mendelsohn, executive director, Lawyers Alliance for World Security -- Dr. Zia Mian, physicist, Princeton University Sen. Douglas Roche, Canadian Senate -- Vice-Admiral Jack Shanahan (ret.) -- former director of the Center for Defense Information -- Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma of the Permanent Mission of India to the UN -- Alice Slater, president, Global Resource Action Center for the Environment -- Stephen Schwartz, publisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; -- Steven Wing, Deptartment of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Editors Note: Media representatives wishing to attend the luncheon briefing should RSVP to Jordan Benjamin 212-584-5000. This event is also open to electronic media and photographers. One-on-one interviews will be available during and after the program.
As part of this conference and to heighten general public awareness about the urgency for global compliance with the NPT, 100,000 copies of a 'serious parody' of The New York Times, dated April 24, 2010, are being widely distributed. One side is titled, The New York Better Times, and proclaims the end of the nuclear age and the signing of a global convention for nuclear disarmament pursuant to Title VI of the NPT. The other side, titled, The New York Times Up! features a near-nuclear war between Russia and Ukraine, imminent war across Taiwan Strait, and the economic and public health impact of stepped up weapons production.
Both newspapers can be viewed on the Web at www.gracelinks.org
-0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 04/24 10:00
----
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4011395,00.html
NPT Opens: And A Good START TOO
Diplomats and Foreign Ministers looked up to a packed public gallery in the General Assembly hall yesterday, the first day of the month-long NPT Review Conference. In addition to the opening speeches from Conference Chair Ambassador Baali, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Director-General of the IAEA Mohamed el-Baradei, the conference adopted a decision on establishing Subsidiary Bodies. Resolving the question of Subsidiary Bodies so early in the meeting bodes well for Ambassador Baali's chairmanship and helped start the meeting on a positive note. Baali went on to swiftly gavel through procedural decisions such as appointing most of the 34 Vice Presidents and 10 Vice Chairs of the Committees and confirming Hannelore Hoppe of the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs as the Secretary General of the Conference.
As promised, Baali started the afternoon session at 3pm sharp to hear twelve speeches. Ambassador Monteiro of Portugal spoke on behalf of the European Union followed by Foreign Minister of Mexico Roasario Green on behalf of the New Agenda Coalition (NAC). Green attached to her speech the anticipated Working Document on Nuclear Disarmament endorsed by the seven NAC countries. Represented at Minister or equivalent levels, statements were made by Algeria, Ireland, South Africa, USA, Germany, China, Colombia, Japan and New Zealand. (these texts will be available at http://www.basicint.org/)
Ambassador Baali predicted a long, painful and particularly delicate Review Conference because of the current 'uncertain international context.' He went on to list reasons for concern which were reiterated by the bulk of today's speakers: the non adherence of Cuba, Israel, India, and Pakistan to the non-proliferation regime; the refusal of the United States Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT); the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament between the Russian Federation and the United States; the new nuclear strategies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Russian Federation; the challenges to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the intention of the United States to deploy an anti-missile defence system; the impasse in the Conference on Disarmament; and the fact that there were 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world capable of obliterating everything that humanity has accomplished.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that, "Much of the established multilateral disarmament machinery has started to rust - a problem due not to the machinery itself but to the apparent lack of political will to use it." The most effective way of overcoming the challenges ahead, he said, would be to embark on a results-based Treaty review process that focused on specific benchmarks. One benchmark would be the entry into force of the CTBT. Another would be the deep, irreversible reduction in stocks of nuclear weapons, wherever they might be. A third would be the consolidation of existing nuclear-weapon-free zones and negotiation of new zones. A fourth would be binding security guarantees to non-nuclear-weapon States Parties. Yet another would be improvements in the transparency of nuclear weapon arsenals and nuclear materials.
The Decision on Subsidiary Bodies
The text of the decision reads as follows:
" The Conference of States parties to the NPT decides to establish for the duration of the 2000 Review Conference a subsidiary body under Main Committee 1 and Main Committee II, respectively. The Conference further decides that
(i) The subsidiary body established under Main Committee 1 as subsidiary body 1 will discuss and consider the practical steps for systematic and progressive efforts to implement article VI of the NPT and paragraphs 3 and 4(c) of the 1995 Decisions on "Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament". The subsidiary body will be chaired by Ambassador Clive Pearson of New Zealand. The subsidiary body will be open-ended. It will hold 4 meetings within the overall time allocated to the Main Committee. The meetings will be held in private.
(ii) The subsidiary body established under Main Committee II as subsidiary body 2 will examine the regional issues, including with respect to the Middle East and implementation of the 1995 Middle East resolution. The subsidiary body will be open-ended. It will hold 4 meetings within the overall times allocated to the Main Committee. The meetings will be held in private. The outcome of the work of the subsidiary body will be reflected in the report of the respective Main Committees to the Conference." The Chair for the subsidiary body of Main Committee II has yet to be chosen. Of the four meetings planned, two will be devoted to the Middle East.
The New Agenda Coalition Working Document on Nuclear Disarmament
Foreign Minister Green introduced this four-page paper as " a working document with measures and steps regarding the obligation under Article VI to achieve nuclear disarmament."
The text, drafted in the style of a final conference document, opens with preambular paragraphs affirming the treaty, the 1995 decisions, the legally binding nature of the NPT commitment by the nuclear-weapon states to the pursuit in good faith of nuclear disarmament and the ICJ Advisory Opinion. After listing concerns regarding stalled negotiations on arms reductions and the continued retention of the nuclear-weapon option by three states, the text goes on stress the ABM Treaty as a cornerstone of stability, stresses the need to lessen the role of nuclear weapons in security policies and affirms that "the maintenance of a nuclear-weapon-free world will require the underpinnings of a universal and multilaterally negotiated legally binding instrument or a framework encompassing a mutually reinforcing set of instruments."
The measures identified by the NAC for the implementation of the NPT are that: 1. the five nuclear-weapon States make an unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals, and engage in an accelerated process of negotiation, taking steps leading to nuclear disarmament in the coming five year period;
2. the USA and the Russian Federation undertake to fully implement START II and begin negotiations on START III;
3. all five nuclear weapon-states are integrated into the process leading to the total elimination of their nuclear weapons.
Six interim steps were identified:
1. an adaptation of policy and posture to preclude the use of nuclear weapons;
2. de-alerting;
3. the reduction of tactical nuclear weapons towards their elimination;
4. a demonstration of greater transparency regarding arsenals and fissile materials;
5. further development of the Trilateral Initiative; and
6. the application of the principle of irreversibility in all nuclear disarmament, arms reduction and arms control measures.
The document then goes on to call for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a treaty to ban the production of fissile materials and the establishment of a subsidiary body in the Conference on Disarmament to deal with nuclear disarmament. The benefits of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones and negative security assurances are outlined and the paper concludes by calling on those not party to the treaty to accede and to renounce the nuclear weapons option.
Tuesday's list of speakers includes Belgium, Australia, Brazil, Lithuania, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, France, Russia, Sweden, Canada and Costa Rica.
-------
Nations Demand Speed-Up of Nuclear Disarmament
NGOs Call for Immediate Dealerting
24th April, 2000
As the month-long Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference opened at the United Nations on Monday, Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden, South Africa and Brazil warned that the disarmament process had stalled.
New Zealand stated that nuclear doctrines were "still embedded" among the nuclear states, and that they remained, "too tentative" when they described nuclear disarmament as an "ultimate" goal.
Mexico stressed that the NPT requires the "total elimination of nuclear weapons" and that such a requirement was reinforced by the unanimous conclusion of the World Court. Mexico warned that the present "critical moment" for the NPT "may be our last and best opportunity" to achieve the goals of the treaty.
Ireland expressed concern that "there has not been an adequate response to the new opportunities to achieve the treaty's goal of a world free of nuclear weapons." Ireland also expressed regret "that there has been too much complacency on the part of public opinion."
When US American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, spoke, she claimed that the US remained committed to a world free of nuclear weapons and that she was convinced that the US would ratify the CTBT. She did not say when. The US, she claimed, had "dismantled 60% of its nuclear weapons." She dismissed concerns that a proposed US ballistic missile defense (BMN) would undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, saying that the AMB had been amended in the past and there was no good reason that it could not be amended again.
Speaking earlier at a UN News Conference hosted by Reaching Critical Will, New Zealand Disarmament Minster, Matt Robson, described using space for military purposes as "abhorrent". He said that the US plans to amend the AMB would threaten disarmament. New Zealand, he said, wanted to "wipe nuclear weapons off the face of the earth". In this, he stated, New Zealand expressed the wish of the vast majority of humanity.
Speaking at the same news conference, energy expert Arjun Makhijani, called for immediate dealerting of all 5000 nuclear weapons still on hair-trigger alert. According to Makhijani, this could be accomplished in a few days.
On Monday evening, demonstrators calling for nuclear disarmament gathered outside the New York Sheraton Hotel where President Clinton and Vice President Gore were attending a fundraiser. Tomorrow morning thousands of demonstrators are expected to rally outside the United Nations, calling for all nations to abide by the NPT obligation for total nuclear disarmament.
Contact:
Felicity Hill, Director Women's International League for Peace and Freedom United Nations Office 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA
Ph: 1 212 682 1265 Fax: 1 212 286 8211
email: flick@igc.apc.org
web: www.wilpf.int.ch www.reachingcriticalwill.org
----
US nuclear agenda undermines non-proliferation treaty
Mark Tran
Monday April 24, 2000
The Guardian
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4011395,00.html
Russia's ratification of two anti-nuclear agreements is a cause for mild celebration as delegates from 187 countries start a month-long conference in New York to review the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), a cornerstone of arms control.
Global disarmament negotiations on a host of issues were making little headway until the Russian parliament in quick succession ratified the long-delayed Start II treaty to cut America's and Russia's nuclear arsenals and the comprehensive test ban treaty, which the US refused to ratify last year.
That leaves the US in an uncomfortable position when Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, speaks today. Not only has the US Congress dragged its feet on the comprehensive test ban, the US will almost certainly proceed with a national missile defence system (NMD), an anti-ballistic missile system designed to protect America from "rogue" states such as North Korea and Iraq.
America's determination to push ahead with this "Son of Star Wars" system is hardly going to encourage the nuclear have-nots to fulfil their end of the bargain at the heart of the NPT.
The treaty, which went into force in 1970, committed the nuclear club - the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - to run down their nuclear stockpiles. In exchange, non-nuclear countries agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons.
In 1995, when the treaty's 25-year term was set to expire, the US led the successful campaign to extend the treaty indefinitely, but only after promising "systematic and progressive efforts" towards disarmament and a global ban on nuclear tests.
But the snail-like progress in getting rid of 20,000 strategic and tactical nuclear arms, most of which belong to the US and Russia, does not set a good example for those chomping at the bit to join the nuclear club. The fragility of the NPT was starkly exposed when India and Pakistan conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in May 1998.
America's determination to go ahead with NMD can only further undermine the NPT by accelerating the shift from traditional methods of deterrence towards the dangerous notion of "limited use" of nuclear weapons, shared by countries such as Pakistan. Russia has contributed to this lowering of the nuclear threshold in adopting a new strategic doctrine that abandons Moscow's "no first use" policy.
In addition, the 66-nation Geneva-based conference on disarmament, the main global arms reduction forum, has stalled for more than two years on a treaty to cut off fissile material, such as production of weapons grade plutonium.
No wonder the Canadian foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, was gloomy at the start of this review conference. "We are going into the meeting without many lights in the window in terms of showing progress and showing that the Faustian bargain between nuclear and non-nuclear states is being respected," he said.
The voice of sanity will come from a two-year-old group called the New Agenda coalition that includes Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden, Egypt and New Zealand. The coalition succeeded in getting a UN general assembly resolution that calls on nuclear weapon states to "engage without delay in an accelerated process of negotiations".
But any such negotiations will be stymied as long as the US pursues its own nuclear agenda.
----
Bleak prospects for nuclear talks
As negotiations begin, the risks are great but ambitions small
Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill
Monday April 24, 2000
The Guardian
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0%2C3858%2C4011243%2C00.html
The commitment of nuclear powers to disarmament faces a severe test at an international conference beginning in New York today to review the 30-year-old non-proliferation treaty.
At the last treaty review conference five years ago the nuclear powers, including Britain, committed themselves to "the determined pursuit . . . of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons".
That high-minded objective received a setback when India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests.
The mood in New York as ministers gather is not optimistic. The US has not helped by threatening to go off in pursuit of a new missile programme. The talks are also being held against a background of indifference in the post-cold-war age.
The mood is beginning to change, however. The first stirrings of unease began four years ago when India and Pakistan, neither of which has signed the NPT treaty, tested nuclear weapons.
Worrying
Just as worrying is the the attitude of the US. Last year congress voted against the comprehensive test ban treaty, the Republicans insisting that the US should not permit any international constraints on its ability to test and modernise its nuclear forces.
The prospects for a concrete conclusion to the NPT discussions in four weeks' time look remote. Those in the nuclear club, while urging other countries not to join, show little sign of being flexible.
Nato's "strategic concept", announced at its 50th anniversary summit in Washington last year, stated that "the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated [by the allies] are . . . extremely remote". But it added: "Nuclear weapons make a unique contribution . . . They demonstrate [to enemies] that aggression of any kind is not a rational option."
Nato continues to reject a "no first use" commitment, and one of Vladimir Putin's first initiatives on becoming president of Russia was to abandon Moscow's "no first use" policy. Against the background of deteriorating conventional forces, he also suggested that Russia would in future rely on a lower nuclear threshold.
The Russian parliament's recent ratification of the Start II arms reduction treaty, which commits each of the two powers to cut its nuclear warheads from 6,000 to 3,500 by 2007, will put further pressure on the US congress to follow suit.
"The Russians will go into the non-proliferation treaty review conference looking like good guys. The spotlight will be on us," a US diplomat said.
The US and Russia are preparing to begin talks on Start III. The Russians want to cut the number of each side's long range nuclear warheads to 1,500. The US does not want to go below 2,000 or 2,500.
But the New York conference also takes place under the shadow of US plans for a national missile defence system (NMD). The project will be "the ghost at the wedding", said Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute, a respected London disarmament thinktank. A decision to go ahead with NMD would require an amendment to the anti-ballistic missile treaty signed by Washington and Moscow in 1972, which enshrines the traditional concept of deterrence and "mutual assured destruction".
Moscow opposes any change to the ABM treaty, despite Washington's insistence that its anti-ballistic missile project is designed to protect the US from "rogue" states such as North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya. But analysts suggest that the US is seeking "absolute security". They argue that the project reflects a dangerous shift from long-held assumptions about deterrence towards a belief in the "limited use" of nuclear weapons, shared by other countries, not least Pakistan.
Violation
"There is a move towards the concept of a 'normalisation' of nuclear weapons, towards reintegrating them into general weapons arsenals," Ms Johnson warned.
Some observers believe that Nato's strategic concept opens the way to it using nuclear weapons against biological and chemical weapons, in violation of the "negative security assurances" given by the nuclear powers in 1995.
The British American Security Information Council argues that Nato's existing "nuclear sharing" arrangements in time of war - whereby European non-nuclear states could gain access to US nuclear bombs - clearly breach the NPT.
The nuclear powers will come under pressure from two groups fed up with what they regard as hypocritical preaching: the "New Agenda" countries, including Japan, Canada, Egypt, Brazil and South Africa, and the Non-Aligned Movement. But those at the opening meeting are not preparing for some huge step forward. At best they hope for a form of words on which they can agree. The nuclear risk is huge, but the ambitions in New York are small.
----
Experts Outline New Dangers, Opportunity for Disarmament
U.S. Newswire
24 Apr 10:59
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0424-107.html
To: National Desk
Contacts: Jordan Benjamin, 212-584-5018 Stephen Kent, 914-424-8382
UN on-site cell phone April 24: 617-283-5047
NEW YORK, April 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- At a briefing during the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 2000 review conference opening session today, (12:30 p.m. at the UN Plaza Hotel, 44th Street at First Avenue, all media are invited) Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, India's UN Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma, retired commanders of nuclear forces, scientists, ex-Administration officials and other experts assess startling new changes in the nuclear landscape.
Last week Russia ratified START II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while President Vladimir Putin announced willingness to cut Russia's arsenal below START II levels to 1500 weapons if the US foregoes its bid to change the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and revive Star Wars. The US declined the offer and envisions maintaining an arsenal of 2500 warheads after START II implementation. Senate Republicans oppose any Administration efforts to renegotiate the ABM treaty with Russia that entail limiting plans for a Star Wars system, preferring instead to scrap the treaty.
In an April 20 letter to President Clinton, Rep. Kucinich says U.S. withdrawal from the ABM would be "unjustifiable" and "destabiliz(ing)." US refusal to cut to 1500 warheads also undermines the NPT and could trigger dire consequences for the non-proliferation regime over the next decade. Signed in 1970, the NPT contains a long-delayed promise by nuclear states to achieve comprehensive disarmament.
But speaking at today's NPT briefing, Kucinich and other experts also say Russia's new impetus for treaty implementation also holds unprecedented opportunities for fulfilling the NPT's promise and making rapid progress towards disarmament in the next ten years.
If the US matches the Russian offer of 1500 warheads, Russia and the US could then realistically negotiate with all the other nuclear weapons states -- which each have fewer than 500 warheads -- to conclude a ban on nuclear weapons, similar to the ban on chemical and biological weapons.
The forum airing these scenarios -- both good and bad -- of how the current proliferation situation may play out over the next decade is called April 24, 2010: Our Nuclear Future.
"Either way, this is a critical crossroads in nuclear history," said Alice Slater, president of GRACE, the Global Action Resource Center for the Environment, a disarmament NGO hosting the briefing.
"From here we may go towards a global convention on disarmament, or to 'Son of Star Wars' and rampant proliferation. As the Russians said, the ball is in our court."
Last week Russia threatened to withdraw from all nuclear treaties if the US chose to violate the ABM, which prohibits building missile shields. Pursuing a Star Wars program would signal that instead of disarming, the US expects to maintain its arsenal indefinitely while other nations do likewise, so there will long be missiles for shields to deter. This undercuts the 1970 NPT, in which non-weapons states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for weapons states' pledge to negotiate comprehensive nuclear disarmament.
This pledge was ruled a legally binding obligation by the World Court in 1996. But recently the US reiterated, including in President Clinton's Decision Directive 60, that nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of US defense for the foreseeable future, directly contradicting the NPT. The US has also pursued modernization of nuclear forces, including new weapons design and refurbishing of 6,000 nuclear warheads under the Stockpile Stewardship program. Currently there are some 36,000 warheads worldwide, including 5,000 on hair-trigger alert.
----
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference at a Glance
Apr 24, 2000
Reuters
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=154067
UNITED NATIONS, Following are some of the main points of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its review conference, which opens at United Nations headquarters on Monday and runs to May 19.
- The NPT is landmark international treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, promote cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and move towards a goal of nuclear disarmament.
- The treaty was opened for signature in 1968 and went into force in 1970. A total of 187 countries have ratified it. India, Pakistan, Israel and Cuba have not.
- The NPT allows only the five declared nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain - to keep their weapons but move towards disarmament. Nations without nuclear arms have to renounce them for good.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency is to verify compliance through inspections and prevent diversion of fissile material for weapons use. Currently, it is unable to verify that North Korea, a treaty signatory, has declared all material subject to safeguards.
- The April-May review conference is the first since the treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995. It is to analyze what happened over the last five years and what should occur during the next five years.
- Main issues under discussion: speed of disarmament by the United States and Russia; whether negotiations on a promised treaty of fissile material will begin; whether reductions in nuclear weapons should accelerate; India-Pakistan nuclear tests; nuclear-weapons free zone in the Middle East; planned U.S. National Missile Defense system.
- Rough 1997 estimates of nuclear warheads (strategic or long-range and tactical, limited non-strategic): U.S.: 7450 strategic, 970 non-strategic; Russia: 6240 and 4,000; France: 429 and 20; Britain: 160 and 100; China: 140 and 150.
----
U.S. dismisses ``unrealistic'' nuclear proposals
April 24, 2000
Reuters
http://www.envirolink.org/environews/reuters/articles/Environment/04_24_2000.reulb-story-bcarmsnuclearalbright.html
UNITED NATIONS, The United States, accused of dragging its feet on giving up nuclear weapons, dismissed on Monday what it called ``unrealistic and premature'' steps toward nuclear disarmament.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the international pressure to disarm but defended U.S. proposals to develop a defence against incoming nuclear missiles.
She said the United States was going about nuclear disarmament the right way and argued for more of the same.
``Far from any radical changes of course, what we need now is more hard work, good faith, and patient political will from every country,'' she told the five-yearly conference in New York to review compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
``We share the frustration many feel about the pace of progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons.
``But we also know that if countries demand unrealistic and premature measures, they will harm the NPT and set back everyone's cause,'' Albright added.
The 1970 treaty gives the first five nuclear countries -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- a monopoly on nuclear weapons, on the understanding that they will negotiate in good faith to dismantle them.
An alliance of seven non-nuclear countries known as the New Agenda Coalition are demanding the nuclear states move faster by renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons, separating warheads from missiles and taking missiles off high alert.
MISSILE DEFENCE
Many countries also object to the U.S. proposals to develop a national missile defence (NMD), ostensibly to protect the country from missiles fired by what it calls ``rogue states,'' including Iran and North Korea.
Russia said on Monday that if Washington went ahead with NMD and withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, it would disrupt talks on a new treaty to limit nuclear arms and bring back ``an era of suspicion and confrontation.''
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also criticised the system on Monday, saying it could restart the arms race and create new incentives for missile proliferation.
The missile defence system would violate the ABM treaty, which Russia and the United States signed in 1972, and the Russians oppose any amendments to accommodate NMD.
But Albright said: ``That treaty has been amended before and there is no good reason it cannot be amended again to reflect new threats from third countries.''
The system could handle at the most tens of missiles and so would not neutralise Russia's nuclear deterrent, she said.
She added: ``There is concern that the United States is turning its back on arms control. And there are persistent calls for a 'new agenda' to force faster progress.
``Although such views are well-meaning and strongly held, let's look carefully at the facts.''
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dismantled 60 percent of its nuclear weapons, pursued arms control talks with Russia and spent over $5 billion on nuclear disarmament in the former Soviet Union, she said.
NOT WITHIN OUR POWER
She quoted President Bill Clinton, in a booklet released by the United States on Monday, as saying the United States remained committed to a world free of nuclear weapons.
``Unfortunately, none of us has it within our power to create overnight the conditions in which complete disarmament is possible. But in our own regions, and in our own ways, we each have a contribution to make,'' she added.
The United States is also vulnerable to criticism at the four-week conference because the U.S. Senate last year failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear tests. The Russian Duma ratified it this month.
Albright noted that the Clinton administration has asked retired General John Shalikashvili to answer the concerns of U.S. senators about the treaty with a view to a new vote.
``I am convinced that America will ratify the CTBT, and thus help ensure the nuclear arms race becomes a relic of the 20th century, not a recurring nightmare of the 21st,'' she said.
Albright ruled out any amendments to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to recognise as nuclear states either India or Pakistan, which made retaliatory nuclear tests in 1998.
On Israel, a U.S. ally which has not signed the NPT, she said a resolution at the New York conference should be ``fair and balanced within the region (the Middle East).''
Other Middle East states repeatedly complain that the United States turns a blind eye to Israel's nuclear programme.
----
Arms control masquerade
April 25, 2000
Frank Gaffney Jr.
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/commentary-2000425153146.htm
The coming days are likely to produce paroxysms in diplomatic circles, the media and advocacy groups over the need to preserve and enhance various international arms control agreements. Specifically, with the opening yesterday of the quadrennial Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in New York, the United States faces a multiweek thrash over its failure to do more to disarm.
Unfortunately, the Clinton-Gore administration's response to such criticism has generally been to grovel, apologize and pander. It refuses to make the case (and presumably does not believe) that the world is a safer place thanks to America's pre-eminent military strength. It recoils from acknowledging that arms control is utterly failing to keep dangerous nations from acquiring deadly weapons of mass destruction - and the means to deliver them against the United States and/or its friends and forces overseas.
Instead, the administration proposes to redouble its efforts to secure still further, ineffectual agreements. For example, it makes no effort to conceal its contempt for the majority of the U.S. Senate that voted last fall to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). It ignores the Senate's conclusion that that accord was unverifiable, unenforceable and would have precluded the United States from maintaining the sort of safe, reliable and effective nuclear deterrent the nation will need for the foreseeable future.
(If any further confirmation of these deficiencies were needed, it can be found in the Russian Duma's ratification of the CTBT last week.) To the contrary, President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright assert that the Senate vote has no impact on the status of that accord, that the United States will continue to be bound by it, and that the CTBT should be brought into force at the earliest possible time.
The Clinton-Gore administration's failure to recognize - and speak the truth about - the futility of arms control under present and future circumstances seems likely to bear its bitterest fruit, however, in the area of missile defense.
In an oped article in yesterday's New York Times, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov telegraphed the punch he intends to deliver during remarks at what arms controllers call the NPT RevCon and in bilateral negotiations with the Clinton administration. "There is [an] important issue: the close connection between the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which bans the signatories from deploying national anti-ballistic missile systems. The United States is considering the creation of such a system, which would be an open violation of the treaty."
Here again, the Clinton-Gore administration's lack of integrity about arms control has subjected the United States unnecessarily, if not dangerously, to Russian blackmail. Like the family that studiously ignores the presence of a crazy aunt in the parlor, the administration has simply refused to acknowledge reality: There is no ABM Treaty in legal force today.
As former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Douglas Feith and former Justice Department official George Miron put it in the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis to date concerning the legal status of the ABM Treaty (a study sponsored by and available from the Center for Security Policy): "The ABM Treaty lapsed by operation of law - that is, automatically - when the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991. It did not become a treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation."
As a result, the "protocols" Foreign Minister Ivanov wants the United States to ratify so START II can go into effect cannot be amendments to an existing treaty. They must, instead, be seen as free-standing undertakings, designed to bind the United States to a new anti-anti-missile defense accords whose scope and terms will make it even more difficult to deploy effective American missile defenses.
For this reason, the Senate should demand that President Clinton promptly submit for its "advice and consent" the protocols recently ratified by the Russian Duma - something he promised to do more than two years ago. If, as seems likely, the Senate were to reject these defective agreements, the United States could avoid the trap now being laid for it: a "Grand Compromise" that would trade radical and ill-advised reductions in U.S. nuclear forces (calculated to appeal not only to arms control ideologues but to a Russian military whose budget shortfalls are obliging it, with or without corresponding American reductions, to cut back on deployed nuclear arms) for yet another "amendment" to the ABM Treaty.
The latter would, at best, lock the United States into the deployment of only a very limited "national" missile defense (NMD) system in Alaska. Importantly, 25 influential senators, including the Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and the Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (who happens to represent Alaska in the Senate), wrote President Clinton last week to warn against such an arms control deal:
"The 'initial NMD architecture' chosen by your administration - a single-site, 100-interceptor system deployed in Alaska beginning not sooner than 2005 - cannot effectively protect the United States. More than a single site is necessary to defend against anticipated threats. . . .
"Given the desirability of discussing these issues with Russia in a way that accurately reflects the views of both the Senate and your administration, our advice is that you reconsider your administration's current approach to NMD policy and arms control and consult further with us. Without significant changes to your approach, we do not believe an agreement submitted to the Senate for consideration should be ratified."
This is the stuff of which momentous national elections are made. President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and their allies are clearly hoping that their security policy approach will not be properly seen by the American people for what it is: a scam, combining ersatz arms control and real, largely unilateral disarmament. The Senate leadership has taken an important step toward framing the issue and offering the voters an alternative approach that relies in the words of Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, on "peace through strength, not pieces of paper."
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.
-------- russia
Russia Sending Uranium to U.S.
APRIL 24, 11:17 EDT
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7426B4O0
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia has exported recycled uranium worth $2 billion to the United States since the two countries signed a deal in 1993 to reduce Russia's nuclear arsenal, a news report said Monday.
The 20-year contract, worth about $11 billion, calls for Russia to export more than 500 tons of recycled uranium from scrapped weapons to the United States. So far, about 80 tons have been sent, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
The deal was a cornerstone of American attempts to get Russia to dispose of nuclear weapons material and preventing it falling into the hands of terrorists or other groups seeking nuclear weapons.
----
U.S., Russian Nukes Under Scrutiny At Key UN Meeting
Apr 24, 2000
Reuters
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=154025
UNITED NATIONS, Most countries in the world are expected to tell the United States and Russia on Monday they are endangering the earth's safety by deploying and stockpiling far too many nuclear weapons.
Russia's decision to ratify Start II, the strategic arms reduction treaty, with the United States as well as the global nuclear test ban earlier this month removes some of the pessimism at a month-long review of the crucial Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), UN officials said.
But Moscow's decision to store rather than destroy 20,000 non-strategic or tactical nuclear weapons is bound to cause concern along with U.S. plans to refurbish its reserve of 2,500-3,000 warheads after Start II's limit of 3,500 deployed warheads for each side is activated.
Signatories to the 1970 NPT, the cornerstone in arms reduction treaties, meet every five years to review progress and set new goals.
This year's conference, beginning on Monday, is the first since the main nuclear states convinced the rest of the world five years ago to extend the treaty indefinitely.
Under the treaty, only five countries - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - are permitted to have nuclear arms. The other 182 parties to the treaty have to renounce nuclear weapons for good.
In turn the five have promised to move toward getting rid of the estimated 20,000 strategic and tactical nuclear arms they have between them, the vast majority in the United States and Russia.
"We are going into the meeting without many lights in the window in terms of showing progress and showing that the Faustian bargain between nuclear and non-nuclear states is being respected," Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy told reporters.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be among the first speakers on Monday afternoon. She intends to submit a written and oral defence of U.S. disarmament since the end of the Cold War. Her spokesman, James Rubin, said on Thursday that Washington had "led the way amongst the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race."
But many non-nuclear nations believe the two big atomic powers have no true strategy for disarmament and have found ways around reduction agreements to maintain their arsenals.
Russia, whose foreign minister Igor Ivanov speaks on Tuesday, has recently increased reliance on nuclear arms to compensate for its deteriorating conventional forces.
And the United States also will come under sharp criticism for its reviving the once dormant, National Missile Defence (NMD) program, dubbed "Star Wars," to shield itself against a terrorist bomb or one from a rogue state.
With many analysts questioning the scientific efficacy of such a defence, its immediate consequence might be a response from Russia for counter measures if Washington insists on modifications to its 30-year-old Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow.
"If you look at world history, ever since men began waging war, you will see that there's a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins," said French President Jacques Chirac in December in what has become the most popular quote among critics of the NMD.
While the United States and Russia are the main targets, India and Pakistan, who blasted their way into the nuclear club in May 1998 by conducting atomic tests, are not expected to escape criticism. India and Pakistan as well as Israel and Cuba are the only four nations not to have joined the treaty.
In addition, the 66-nation Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, the main global arms reduction forum, has stalled for more than two years on a treaty to cut off fissile material, such as production of weapons grade plutonium.
Much of the criticism is expected to be led by a two-year-old group called the New Agenda Coalition that includes South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden, Egypt and New Zealand.
The coalition succeeded in getting a General Assembly resolution that calls on nuclear weapon states to "engage without delay in an accelerated process of negotiations."
----
Chance for a Safer World
We must embrace Russia's new willingness to fight nuclear terrorism.
By Graham T. Allison and Sam Nunn
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page A25
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/009l-042400-idx.html
The Russian Duma's ratification of the START II nuclear arms treaty, following president-elect Vladimir Putin's calls for even deeper cuts in Russia's nuclear arsenals, presents a major opportunity for the Clinton administration to advance American national security interests. On the basis of conversations with Russian experts and officials in Moscow, we are confident that Putin would be receptive to a bold proposal for a joint Russian-American initiative to prevent terrorist theft of Russian nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials.
In a speech at a nuclear weapons center on March 31, Putin said that his government should work to "free the world from piles of excess weapons." Calling for further cuts and stepped-up efforts to streamline Russia's nuclear capabilities, he said: "Our aim is to make our nuclear weapons complex more safe and effective."
We recently served as members of a task force that engaged 100 experts in a review of nuclear security today--after a decade of vigorous engagement supported by the Nunn-Lugar program and related legislation. Despite a decade of effort, the risks of "loose nukes" are larger today than they were when these efforts began. U.S. programs have had positive results, but declines in Russia's economy and in the government's ability to control anything--from money to nuclear materials--has had larger negative consequences. The good news is that Russians are ready to engage in more joint efforts to secure Russia's nuclear materials.
Russians' awareness of their vulnerability to terrorism has been raised dramatically by recent experience. Last summer's attack upon Russian territory in Dagestan by rogue warlords operating from Chechen territory; the bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities that killed more than 300 people; and threats by fighters in Chechnya to attack nuclear power plants and other facilities in Russia--all have given terrorism a terrifying face for ordinary Russians. Polls from last November find that 90 percent of Russians surveyed fear a terrorist attack on nuclear facilities, and 86 percent fear that a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist could be used against Russia.
The American public also recognizes the threat. A September Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that the threat of terrorist acts on U.S. soil ranks second among Americans' biggest fears.
Our task force identified a number of serious initiatives that can reduce this danger. At the top of our recommendations are:
* Buy and take all the nuclear weapons material Russia is prepared to sell. In addition to highly enriched uranium (HEU) purchases, the U.S. government should buy all available Russian HEU, which, when blended with low-enriched uranium, becomes proliferation resistant and commercially valuable. Under the current agreement, less than half of Russia's HEU would be blended over the next 20 years. Plutonium also should be purchased, but that will require more substantial public subsidies since it currently has no commercial use.
* Remove potential bomb material from the most vulnerable sites in Russia. Caches of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, sufficient for making dozens of bombs, still can be found at many facilities across Russia. As part of a renewed "buy and secure" campaign, potential bomb material should be consolidated in central, more secure storage facilities.
* Accelerate the blending down of highly enriched uranium. The United States should provide the capital investment and financial incentives for Russia to blend down all excess HEU in the next four years. For an investment of approximately $500 million, we could get all of the excess Russian HEU blended to nonweapons-usable forms within Putin's first term.
These deals should be accompanied by Russia's agreement not to produce additional nuclear materials. Also, given Europe's proximity to Russia and Japan's experience as a target of terrorism, our allies should share the costs. July's G-8 summit in Okinawa provides a setting in which these deals could be done.
Mutual concern about terrorism and a new, energetic leader in Moscow who seems to be willing to address his nation's nuclear reality present a rare opportunity for sharply reducing dangers to Americans, Russians and the world.
Graham T. Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Sam Nunn is a former Democratic senator from Georgia.
----
A Challenge From Russia
April 24, 2000
By IGOR IVANOV
http://www.nytimes.com/00/04/24/oped/24ivan.html
MOSCOW -- The ratification of the Start II weapons agreement and the 1997 package of antiballistic missile agreements by both houses of the Russian parliament, followed by the passage on Friday of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the lower house, clearly signal the course of action that, in Moscow's opinion, should be pursued in the complicated world situation that is emerging.
Strategic offensive arms have always occupied a special place in the range of disarmament treaties created over recent decades; and they play an important role in Russian-American relations and are of course directly linked to Russia's security.
The Russian leadership, military and diplomatic experts, and members of the parliament have studied these issues for almost four years because they have no right to make a mistake on such matters. And if Start II was not ratified earlier, the reasons for that are known: it was put aside by parliament in connection with the bombings in Iraq in late 1998 and then again because of the NATO military action against Yugoslavia last year.
Having ratified the package of Start II and the ABM agreements, Russia has done its part. The ball is now in the court of the United States. An exchange of ratification documents for these agreements would make it possible to put them into effect and continue the process of reducing strategic arms. And there is another important issue: the close connection between Start II and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans the signatories from deploying national antiballistic missile systems. The United States is considering the creation of such a system, which would be an open violation of the treaty.
Everyone should be aware that the collapse of the ABM treaty would have a destructive domino effect for the existing system of disarmament agreements. The terms on which Start I and II were agreed would change. Even from the formal point of view, if the United States withdrew from the ABM treaty, Russia would not be bound by its strategic arms reduction obligations. The further question of the fate of agreements on medium- and shorter-range missiles would arise. Finally, the development of Start III would be disrupted. We would be back in an era of suspicion and confrontation.
I am sure that this is not a prospect to be relished by anyone, especially in Russia or the United States.
Our countries have expended too much effort and too many resources toward ending the cold war and confrontation.
At the same time, Russians are closely following the debate in the United States on the dangers from missiles and possible countermeasures. The view that prevails here -- and is reflected in the decision of the Russian parliamentarians -- is that this threat (which, by the way, our specialists think is at least exaggerated) should not be counteracted in a destructive way. There are other ways that would be far more effective in terms of international stability. For instance, the start of direct dialogue between America and North Korea has brought a very positive reaction in the world because it may help clarify many of the issues, including those connected with missile challenges.
Russia proposes to the United States that we jointly develop a program that would prevent the proliferation of missiles and missile technologies or remove incentives for acquiring them. Another path is to continue efforts to strengthen the control of rocket technology and to create a global control system to prevent proliferation of missiles and missile technology. In March, Moscow hosted an international meeting of experts on such a system, at which representatives of 50 countries exchanged ideas on practical steps.
Russia is prepared to cooperate with America and other countries in creating systems of nonstrategic antimissile defense that are not banned under the 1972 ABM treaty. The basis for this is provided by the Russian-American agreements on the delimitation of strategic and nonstrategic ABM systems of 1997, which are awaiting ratification by the Congress.
And finally, further cuts of strategic weapons -- and Russia is ready to bring the total ceiling of nuclear warheads to 1,500 under Start III, reciprocally with the United States -- provide an additional stimulus for the strengthening of the regimes of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and means of their delivery.
In short, the Russian side offers a constructive alternative to the disruption of strategic stability. And we are also open to positive ideas of the American side aimed at further cooperation in the disarmament field. The decision of the parliament on the Start-ABM package is, in effect, our invitation.
Igor Ivanov is foreign minister of Russia.
----
U.S., Russian Nuclear Arms Under Scrutiny at UN
April 24, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-nu.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Most countries in the world are expected to tell the United States and Russia on Monday they are endangering the earth's safety by deploying and stockpiling far too many nuclear weapons.
Russia's decision to ratify Start II, the strategic arms reduction treaty, with the United States as well as the global nuclear test ban earlier this month removes some of the pessimism at a month-long review of the crucial Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), U.N. officials said.
But Moscow's decision to store rather than destroy 20,000 non-strategic or tactical nuclear weapons is bound to cause concern along with U.S. plans to refurbish its reserve of 2,500-3,000 warheads after Start II's limit of 3,500 deployed warheads for each side is activated.
Signatories to the 1970 NPT, the cornerstone in arms reduction treaties, meet every five years to review progress and set new goals.
This year's conference, beginning on Monday, is the first since the main nuclear states convinced the rest of the world five years ago to extend the treaty indefinitely.
Under the treaty, only five countries -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China -- are permitted to have nuclear arms. The other 182 parties to the treaty have to renounce nuclear weapons for good.
In turn the five have promised to move toward getting rid of the estimated 20,000 strategic and tactical nuclear arms they have between them, the vast majority in the United States and Russia.
``We are going into the meeting without many lights in the window in terms of showing progress and showing that the Faustian bargain between nuclear and non-nuclear states is being respected,'' Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy told reporters.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be among the first speakers on Monday afternoon. She intends to submit a written and oral defense of U.S. disarmament since the end of the Cold War. Her spokesman, James Rubin, said on Thursday that Washington had ``led the way amongst the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race.''
But many non-nuclear nations believe the two big atomic powers have no true strategy for disarmament and have found ways around reduction agreements to maintain their arsenals.
Russia, whose foreign minister Igor Ivanov speaks on Tuesday, has recently increased reliance on nuclear arms to compensate for its deteriorating conventional forces.
And the United States also will come under sharp criticism for its reviving the once dormant, National Missile Defense (NMD) program, dubbed ``Star Wars,'' to shield itself against a terrorist bomb or one from a rogue state.
With many analysts questioning the scientific efficacy of such a defense, its immediate consequence might be a response from Russia for counter measures if Washington insists on modifications to its 30-year-old Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow.
``If you look at world history, ever since men began waging war, you will see that there's a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins,'' said French President Jacques Chirac in December in what has become the most popular quote among critics of the NMD.
While the United States and Russia are the main targets, India and Pakistan, who blasted their way into the nuclear club in May 1998 by conducting atomic tests, are not expected to escape criticism. India and Pakistan as well as Israel and Cuba are the only four nations not to have joined the treaty.
In addition, the 66-nation Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, the main global arms reduction forum, has stalled for more than two years on a treaty to cut off fissile material, such as production of weapons grade plutonium.
Much of the criticism is expected to be led by a two-year-old group called the New Agenda Coalition that includes South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden, Egypt and New Zealand.
The coalition succeeded in getting a General Assembly resolution that calls on nuclear weapon states to ``engage without delay in an accelerated process of negotiations.''
----
Russia Warns U.S. Against ABM Withdrawal
April 24, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-iv.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday that U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty would disrupt talks on a new treaty to limit nuclear arms and bring back ``an era of suspicion and confrontation''.
In an article published in The New York Times, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov also repeated a warning that Russia would not feel bound by previous arms control obligations if the United States pulls out of the ABM treaty.
The article appeared on the day a five-yearly review conference opened at the United Nations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The conference is an opportunity for non-nuclear powers to vent their frustration at the slow progress toward nuclear disarmament by the United States and the other ``declared'' nuclear powers -- Britain, China, France and Russia.
Washington is especially vulnerable to criticism because of its research on a system to defend the United States from missile attack, a system expected to require either modification or abrogation of its ABM treaty with Russia.
``If the United States withdrew from the ABM treaty, Russia would not be bound by its strategic arms reduction obligations. The further question of the fate of agreements on medium and shorter-range missiles would arise,'' Ivanov wrote.
``Finally, the development of START III would be disrupted. We would be back in an era of suspicion and confrontation,'' added the foreign minister, who will attend the New York conference on Tuesday.
Russia and the United States have started preliminary talks on a START III treaty, to cut the number of nuclear warheads they have to below the levels set in START II in 1993.
The talks are expected to accelerate now that the Russian Duma finally ratified START II earlier this month.
In his article, Ivanov said Russia was ready to cooperate with the United States and other countries on missile defenses that would not violate the ABM treaty.
He also proposed cooperation between Russia and the United States on ``a program that would prevent the proliferation of missiles and missile technologies or remove incentives for acquiring them''.
The Clinton administration has promised to take a decision this summer on whether it should deploy a national missile defense system, which it says would be designed to intercept missiles fired by ``rogue states'' or fired in error.
It says it would not undermine the nuclear arsenals of the other nuclear powers, which have enough missiles to overwhelm it. But Russia says it would undermine one of the pillars of an arms control system negotiated over decades.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will speak at the New York conference later on Monday to defend the U.S. position and its record on reducing nuclear arsenals.
----
Sanctions Placed on Russian Educator
April 24, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-US-Russia-Iran.html
WASHINGTON (AP)-- The State Department announced sanctions Monday against the head of a Russian engineering university for alleged actions that could contribute to Iran's missile development program.
The action was taken against Yuri Savelyev, the director of Baltic State Technical University in St. Petersburg.
State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the sanctions were levied after a Russian Ministry of Education probe concluded that Savelyev was involved in the transfer of sensitive technology to Iran.
It also revealed a number of violations of procedures for enrolling foreign students, he said.
Rubin said administrative action was taken against Savelyev and that specialized courses for Iranian students were canceled. Training of Iranian specialists at the school also was canceled, he said.
In response to the Russian action, Rubin said the United States is imposing a ban on its government assistance to and procurement from Savelyev. A ban on U.S. exports and imports involving Savelyev also was imposed, Rubin said.
He added that the Russian government's action against Savelyev demonstrates Russia's commitment to stopping the flow of sensitive technologies to Iran.
It also ``underscores the importance of continued U.S.-Russian cooperation in combatting the threat posed by Iran's aggressive pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems,'' he said.
-------- spying
Fallout From a CIA Affidavit
Rogue Ex-Agent Seeks to Overturn '83 Conviction
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/140l-042400-idx.html
The globe-trotting exploits of Edwin P. Wilson, a rogue former CIA agent, ended in a Houston courtroom in 1983. Federal prosecutors accused him of shipping 22 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya in the largest illegal arms deal in U.S. history. Wilson's only defense: He had been selling arms to Libya as cover to gather intelligence for the CIA.
At a critical point in the trial, prosecutors presented an affidavit from a top CIA official denying that Wilson had been asked "to perform or provide any services, directly or indirectly." Before convicting Wilson, the jury asked to have the affidavit reread to them. That convinced the lone holdout. Wilson got 52 years in prison.
Now, nearly two decades later, that brief sworn statement--3 1/2 pages signed by Charles A. Briggs, then the third-ranking CIA official--is having an explosive impact of its own.
It turns out the affidavit wasn't true. Wilson had in fact been asked to perform services for the CIA, although none of them involved the selling of C-4.
Newly declassified documents show that a CIA investigator immediately questioned the accuracy of the affidavit after Wilson was convicted. Senior attorneys at both the CIA and the Justice Department concluded that they had to alert Wilson and his attorneys. The Supreme Court has held that prosecutors who discover they have used inaccurate testimony to obtain a conviction must inform both the court and the defendant.
But the government never told Wilson or his attorneys, making only an indirect, limited disclosure in a court document filed eight months later. The full story was hidden for years until Wilson himself unearthed documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
Wilson's court-appointed attorney, former CIA operative David Adler, has filed a motion seeking to have Wilson's conviction overturned on grounds that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony and then failed to disclose it to Wilson's lawyers. His allegations of prosecutorial misconduct are under review by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.
"I don't think there's any question I wanted disclosure; that's the way I operate," said Stanley Sporkin, the CIA's general counsel at the time, who retired in January after 14 years as a U.S. district judge in Washington. "I probably went further than anybody would have gone--I took it up to the top of the [Justice Department]. This was a Justice Department issue. They were the lawyers in the courtroom. How much can you insist?"
Sporkin denied knowing that the Briggs affidavit was false at the time. The Justice Department also denies that prosecutors knowingly used a false affidavit. But the department now admits in legal filings: "With the benefit of retrospection and in light of all the information now known to the Department, it appears that the statement was inaccurate."
Nonetheless, Justice lawyers argue that the affidavit's inaccuracy should not invalidate Wilson's conviction without evidence that the CIA authorized him to sell C-4 to Libya. The department also contends that its limited disclosure 16 years ago corrected Briggs's "misstatement."
Regardless of its outcome, Wilson's case raises an issue best formed as a pair of questions: What did prosecutors know and when did they know it? The saga gives a rare glimpse of government attorneys maneuvering to obtain a conviction and then rationalizing their tactics. The case also contains a central irony: The CIA, despite its reputation for flouting the law, immediately lobbied for full disclosure, only to be overruled by senior Justice Department officials.
Wilson's attorney also has filed a motion before U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston asking that 17 current and former CIA and Justice Department officials be held in contempt, including Sporkin; two top Reagan Justice officials, Stephen S. Trott and D. Lowell Jensen, both now federal judges; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark M. Richard, now in his 33rd year with the department; former assistant U.S. attorney E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., now a well-known D.C. defense attorney; and veteran federal prosecutor Theodore Greenberg.
Like Sporkin, Barcella denied knowing that the Briggs affidavit was false at the time. Trott, Jensen, Richard and Greenberg either declined to comment or did not respond to telephone calls.
If the federal court in Houston rules in Wilson's favor, the likely remedy would be a new trial, according to Georgetown University law professor Samuel Dash, former chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee.
"He's entitled to a new trial, in which all of the relevant evidence gets in," Dash said. "Whether it would raise a reasonable doubt with the jury is another question."
Wilson, 72, a strapping 6-foot-5 man with thinning white hair, has spent almost 18 years in prison.
"Deception and lies may serve a purpose in the world of espionage," Adler wrote in Wilson's motion, "but they have no place in the justice system."
Wilson: A CIA Renegade 'On a Different Level'
Prosecutors had ample motivation for vigorously pursuing Edwin Wilson in the early 1980s. While awaiting trial in Houston, Wilson offered a convicted murderer $500,000 to kill two prosecutors, an act for which Wilson was subsequently convicted.
Wilson was part of a generation of renegade Cold War CIA operatives; a number of his associates were implicated in the Iran-contra scandal in the late 1980s. His arms trading began as an outgrowth of his CIA career running agency front companies. At his peak in the early 1980s, Wilson was estimated to be worth $23 million; he owned a 2,500-acre horse farm in Fauquier County and other properties stretching from North Carolina to Lebanon.
He fled the country to avoid arrest in 1980. He lived in a luxurious villa outside Tripoli, serving as an adviser to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. And when he was finally apprehended in June 1982, Wilson carried bogus passports from Ireland, Britain and Malta.
Setting aside traitors such as former CIA officer Aldrich H. Ames, Wilson is perhaps the most legendary bad man in the annals of the CIA. His case eventually would become fodder for nonfiction thrillers such as "Manhunt: the Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist" by Peter Maas and "The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson" by Joseph C. Goulden and Alexander W. Raffio.
"Every intelligence agency has its cowboys," said David Wise, a noted author and espionage expert. "But Ed Wilson was a crook, a renegade--he's on a different level. The CIA provided him with cover, which they've done before. But he then used the CIA to enrich himself."
Barcella, the prosecutor almost singularly responsible for bringing Wilson to justice, said: "Here was a guy who gave the world's leading terrorist 40,000 pounds of a terrorist's favorite weapon, plastic explosives."
The Briggs Affidavit: A Crucial Tool for Trial
The Briggs affidavit took shape in Houston on Feb. 3, 1983, three days before Wilson's conviction. This account is based on hundreds of pages of internal government documents introduced in court as part of the motion to overturn Wilson's conviction.
Lead prosecutor Ted Greenberg wanted to shred Wilson's "CIA defense" with an affidavit from Briggs, then the CIA's executive director and now retired. So Briggs and two CIA attorneys, Edmund Cohen and David Pearline, got together to draft it. They agreed at the outset that the Briggs affidavit should state that there were no CIA records authorizing the shipment of C-4 to Libya. They set out to define Wilson's relationship with the CIA as narrowly as possible by using the word "tasking," a specific request for a service.
The three CIA men knew that the agency's own extensive reporting had found that there were many "contacts" with Wilson since his retirement in 1971--social occasions, exchanges of information--but no "tasking." There was one exception in 1972, when the CIA paid Wilson $1,000 for sending an employee to Libya to gather information. The $1,000 payment would be noted in the affidavit.
The three men then decided that a layman might not understand the term "tasking." So the group substituted the word "services." The document now said the CIA never "asked or requested [Wilson] to perform or provide any services for CIA."
Greenberg, seeking to make the affidavit even stronger, rewrote the sentence to read: Edwin P. Wilson was not "asked or requested, directly or indirectly, to perform or provide any services, directly or indirectly, for CIA."
But the tinkering had so expanded the meaning of the sentence that it made the document inaccurate. Wilson alleges that the government lawyers knew they were shading the truth. The Justice Department now concedes only that government lawyers apparently failed to comprehend that they had "stripped the term 'services' of crucial qualifying language connoting an intelligence gathering function."
Shortly after the affidavit was drafted in Houston, CIA general counsel Sporkin, in Langley, told the lawyers that he opposed using it, thinking it confusing and a possible basis for appeal, because Wilson's lawyers would not be able to cross-examine a piece of paper.
But Greenberg disregarded Sporkin's repeated objections, saying he felt the affidavit was essential to winning the case.
Greenberg read the affidavit in court on the final day of trial. The jury retired for the evening after deliberating for four hours.
When jurors reconvened the next morning, they asked the judge to reread the Briggs affidavit. An hour later, they returned a verdict: guilty.
"There were several of us that thought possibly the CIA might have something to do with that, but when they admitted that last affidavit, that convinced me," juror Betty Metzler told United Press International the day Wilson was convicted.
A Debate Over Duty To Disclose Inaccuracy
At the CIA, Mark Tanes wasn't convinced. He worked in the agency's inspector general's office and had been researching Wilson for at least a year to help the prosecutors in Houston.
On Feb. 8, three days after Wilson's conviction, Tanes penned a memo to the CIA's inspector general questioning the accuracy of the Briggs affidavit. Tanes cited several undisclosed CIA requests for services from Wilson.
Within two days, Justice Department attorney Kim Rosenfield sent a memo to her boss, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard, entitled, "Duty to Disclose Possibly False Testimony."
The memo noted that case law required a prosecutor to correct false testimony. A new trial was required if the false testimony could "in any reasonable likelihood have affected the judgment of the jury."
At the top of the memo someone wrote: "Plain meaning of services--the affid. is inaccurate."
Spurred by the memos from Tanes and Rosenfield, Sporkin's office quickly drafted a letter to Wilson's lawyer disclosing problems with the Briggs affidavit.
Sporkin, the CIA's top lawyer, forwarded the draft letter to Richard at the Justice Department. Sporkin pushed to have the matter resolved before Wilson's sentencing, but noted in a memo he placed in his own files that Richard "indicated there was very little sentiment in DOJ to do anything about the Briggs' declaration."
Richard, often described as a pillar of the Criminal Division, then alerted his boss, Assistant Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen, now a senior U.S. district judge in Northern California.
"As for my own views, I think we must make a disclosure--either to the judge or the defense attorney," Richard counseled in a handwritten note to Jensen dated Feb. 22. "A third option is to disclose to both."
In April, the CIA completed its final review of Wilson's services and sent the Justice Department a detailed list of 80 contacts between Wilson and CIA personnel after 1971. Twice, a CIA officer had asked Wilson to provide antitank weapons for a sensitive operation. On another occasion, the CIA had negotiated the sale of two salt-water distillation units to Egypt through Wilson's firm.
The CIA's associate deputy director, Theodore G. Shackley, a legendary operative known as the "Blond Ghost," had asked Wilson for a list of his Libyan contacts. Shackley also had met with Wilson in the late 1970s to see if Wilson could acquire a Soviet surface-to-air missile system.
By midsummer, Richard wrote Jensen that "disclosure is, unfortunately, necessary. I suspect I am in the minority."
In undated handwritten notes by an unidentified participant at a CIA-Justice meeting, Jensen is quoted as saying the government had an "underlying obligation of disclosure to court."
Jensen left the Justice Department and was replaced on Aug. 1, 1983, by Stephen Trott. And the thinking on disclosure shifted.
Another handwritten note from an Aug. 8 meeting states that disclosure, if deemed necessary, should be made only in the government's reply to Wilson's appeal, not to Wilson or his attorney.
This would likely ensure that the appeals court would "treat the issue without much attention," the note says. Such disclosure "at worst" would result in only a "limited remand" to the trial court, not a full reversal of Wilson's conviction.
It is not clear who decided to limit disclosure to the appellate brief. Wilson's lawyer alleges it was Trott.
The eventual disclosure was brief and perfunctory: two instances beyond the Briggs declaration in which "the CIA enlisted Wilson's assistance in business transactions." There was nothing about the list of 80 contacts. The appeals court upheld Wilson's conviction without comment.
The letter drafted to Wilson's attorney was never sent.
View From Jail: 'A Few Greedy Prosecutors'
Barred doors open slowly, and Edwin Wilson is escorted into the beige interview room at Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison in rural Pennsylvania that also houses convicted spies Aldrich Ames and John A. Walker Jr.
Wilson is dressed in khaki trousers and a gray sweat shirt, clutching a thick sheaf of documents. Unrepentant, he has become a dogged jailhouse lawyer, arguing that he never would have been convicted if the government had played fair.
"It wasn't the CIA, it was the Justice Department," Wilson said during a long and rambling interview. "I'm not mad at the agency, I love the agency. I'm mad at a few greedy prosecutors."
Wilson works now in the prison recreation center, operating a blood pressure machine. Robust and amiable, he lifts weights for two or three hours a day and still spends hours reading law books and marking government documents with a yellow highlighter.
One of them is the Briggs affidavit. A bald-faced lie, he calls it. "A prosecutor has an obligation to tell the truth, not to cover up, not to commit perjury," he said.
Someday he'd like to go back to Washington, rent a "one-light-bulb room" somewhere cheap, gather all his documents on a table, and write his own book. But all that depends on the court in Texas.
"If I don't win in Houston," Edwin Wilson said, "I'll never get out."
The Paper Trail
Government documents obtained by lawyers for former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson show the evolution of the government's position, presented in a Houston federal courtroom in 1983, that Wilson was not asked to do work for the agency after his retirement in 1971.
Feb. 3, 1983: Affidavit by CIA official Charles A. Briggs denying Wilson did work for the agency.
Feb. 8, 1983: Memo from CIA employee Mark Tanes showing that Wilson did do work for the agency.
Feb. 10, 1983: Memo from Justice Department attorney on issues raised by the Tanes memo.
Feb. 17, 1983: CIA general counsel Stanley Sporkin seeking a quick resolution.
Feb. 18, 1983: Letter drafted by Justice Department informing Wilson's lawyer of problems with the Briggs affidavit. The letter was never sent.
Feb. 22, 1983: Note from Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard recommending disclosure.
Aug. 8, 1983: Notes of a CIA-Justice meeting in which the benefits of a limited disclosure are discussed.
January 2000: Government's response to Wilson's motion for a new trial.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine Admits Rocket Hit Apartment
APRIL 24, 08:14 EDT
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7423L780
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - An explosion that wrecked an apartment building and killed three people was caused by a rocket veering off course during a military training exercise, the Defense Ministry admitted Monday.
Metal shards found at the blast site proved that a rocket launched from 80 miles away slammed into the nine-story building last Thursday, the Interfax news agency quoted Volodymyr Tereshchenko, commander of Ukraine's artillery forces, as saying.
The explosion, which destroyed seven stories of the building in the central Ukrainian town of Brovary, killed three people and forced the evacuation of 91 others.
The Soviet-designed surface-to-surface 9M-79 missile was launched in a training exercise shortly before the blast. Initially, the Defense Ministry denied the missile hit the apartment building, claiming that a crater found near the rocket's intended target proved it stayed on course.
According to Interfax, Tereshchenko said a malfunction in the rocket's rudders may have caused it to veer off target and hit the building.
-------- us nuc facilities
America's Cold War casualties
By Robert Alvarez
April 24, 2000
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/04/24/nuclear/index.html
A former Energy Department official dissects President Clinton's new plan to help the sick workers who built the country's nuclear arsenal.
WASHINGTON -- Barely noticed in the media blizzard swirling around Elián González, the stock market crash and street protests in Washington earlier this month, the Clinton administration quietly proposed a plan to compensate Department of Energy workers ailing from illnesses related to beryllium and radiation exposure. This is the U.S. government's first real response to a long-term problem it has only recently admitted: That the stockpiling of nuclear missiles during the Cold War era came at a considerable human cost. The DOE now acknowledges that radiation exposure at its nuclear plants has led to an increased risk of cancer for the agency's own employees.
Spurred by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, the White House proposes to spend an estimated $400 million over the next five years and give the DOE sweeping powers to determine how and if workers should be compensated. Though still subject to congressional approval, this plan is deeply flawed, because it roughly equates to giving the tobacco industry authority to decide who, if anyone, should be compensated for smoking-related diseases.
Furthermore, the DOE would allocate funds to the program from its overall budget -- forcing sick workers and their families to compete for cash during the congressional budgeting process with other departmental priorities, like the powerful nuclear weapons laboratories, massive environmental cleanup programs and ongoing research and development efforts. Given the clout of the weapons program alone, it doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to figure out how well the sick workers will fare.
Nevertheless, the decision to even try to compensate nuclear weapons workers -- with payments as high as $100,000 in extreme cases -- is an acknowledgment not only of the cost of disease in the workplace but also of the DOE's past abuse of power in putting people at risk without their informed consent.
Richardson first announced his agency's shift in tack last July, when he said that President Clinton would seek to establish a federal compensation program for sick Energy Department employees. As part of an interagency effort convened by Clinton, the DOE compiled recent health studies (both published and unpublished) of its employees.
All told, workers at 14 DOE facilities were found to have increased risks of death from various cancers and nonmalignant diseases after exposure to radiation and other substances. Some of the studies also supported the controversial 1976 findings of Thomas Mancuso, Alice Stewart and George Kneale, who documented a tenfold increase in radiation-caused cancer risks in employees at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.
Since the days of radium's discovery by Marie Curie, Americans have struggled with the dangerous health effects of atomic energy. Curie's own denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy we now face as America's long romance with the atom slowly degrades into a bad memory that won't fade away. The once-dynamic and sprawling federal nuclear weapons industry and its civilian counterpart is phasing down, leaving behind serious environmental and health issues that will need to be addressed for centuries to come.
--
AMERICA'S COLD WAR CASUALTIES | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
The DOE's long-standing indifference to sick workers originated in the Cold War culture of isolation and secrecy, wherein sick workers who filed claims were looked upon as threats to the nation's goal of nuclear deterrence.
The DOE relies on contractors to perform about 90 percent of its work, including the day-to-day operation of its nuclear plants, and to guarantee a safe working environment. But the agency has perpetuated its disturbing record by blocking any outside regulation of worker safety. No other federal entity engaged in hazardous activities has been permitted to maintain such sweeping self-policing powers, without outside accountability. As a result, the DOE still does not have a meaningful worker safety regulatory regime in place.
And until 1988, DOE contractors were shielded from any criminal and legal liability for the extraordinary dangers of nuclear production, with the U.S. government picking up the tab for any lawsuits brought against them, even for criminal acts of willful negligence. And legal protections afforded to contractors were used to block compensation of sick workers in workplace-exposure lawsuits.
In the not-so-distant past, the DOE even went to illegal extremes to shield itself from worker suits. In the early 1980s, it was discovered that the state of Nevada had had a secret agreement with the DOE and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, dating back to the 1950s that allowed the agencies to determine radiation compensation claims filed by Nevada test site workers or their survivors. In 1984, a federal appeals court ruled that the program was illegal. This aggressive policy to avoid legal liability for worker compensation at all costs persists, despite the best efforts by a succession of energy secretaries to change it.
For instance, on May 14, 1997, an explosion occurred at Hanford, exposing 11 workers to dangerous materials. They suffered blistering, hearing loss, coughing fits and headaches minutes after being marched outside under the toxic explosion's plume. Mandatory equipment to test for radiological exposure, such as nasal swabs and urine-testing equipment, suddenly disappeared when it was most needed. The workers were told to drive themselves to the hospital, but after consulting with Hanford officials, physicians refused to perform blood and urine testing. The workers were then sent home in their contaminated clothing. Today, many are still sick and can't return to work.
Only after direct intervention that year by Energy Secretary Federico Peña did the DOE and its Washington contractor grudgingly agree, after lengthy delays, to fund limited independent medical tests. But after Peña's departure from the department, the Hanford victims were effectively ignored, their case buried in bureaucratic mire. The only public acknowledgment of negligence the victims received was an indirect apology on television by the contractor's president -- after a scathing report by the state was released.
In recent years, workplace safety has steadily decreased at several DOE sites. The skilled and qualified personnel needed to ensure safe storage and processing of nuclear materials are rapidly graying. "Some sites are in danger of losing this expertise through retirement and have not implemented provisions to maintain the necessary knowledge base," stated a September 1998 DOE oversight report. More recently, in a stinging professional dissent in February, a senior nuclear weapons safety official noted: "The department delegated safety to those running the hazardous operations. The tradition of 'leave it to those who know best' colored and compromised" safety at the DOE's nuclear facilities.
Between 1991 and 1999, there were at least 18 incidents at a high-level radioactive-waste incineration facility at the DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in which workers were exposed to excessive levels of radiation, a separate September 1998 report noted. "Workplace safety at INEEL has deteriorated since 1994 ... corrective action plans found that deficiencies were not resolved and that lessons learned from previous accidents were not being effectively applied ... One-fifth of all INEEL occurrences in 1997 were related to radiation protection (personnel contamination)," the report read.
The lessons of these reports should come as no surprise. From the 1940s to the present, the senior ranks of the DOE and its predecessors were well aware of continuing problems of exposure at nuclear weapons sites across the country. But they chose to suppress this information and avoid taking necessary protective measures. According to once-classified records, from the late '40s through the '60s, the leadership of the AEC was told on several occasions that numerous workers had been exposed at federal nuclear sites in New Mexico, Washington, New York, Ohio, Colorado and Tennessee. In some instances, workers showed current medical evidence of harm.
In 1951, the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine was told that exposure to radiation at AEC plants was "a very serious health problem. This problem is present in other AEC manufacturing plants and will be important in new installations not only from the standpoint of real injury but because of the extreme difficult of defense in cases of litigation."
The same year, after repeated efforts to persuade the AEC to conduct radiation-related cancer studies, the advisory committee's vice chairman, Ernest Goodpasture, wrote to AEC chairman Gordon Dean, stating, "Cancer is a significant industrial hazard of the atomic energy business ... The committee recommends the cancer program be pursued as a humanitarian duty to the nation." His plea went unheeded, and the AEC decided not to inform workers of their exposure or to take any medically protective action because, according to a 1960 memo uncovered at a Paducah, Ky., facility, the release of such information "is reflected in an increase in insurance claims, increased difficulty in labor relations and adverse public sentiment."
The recent disclosure by the Washington Post of lax working conditions at the DOE's plant in Paducah demonstrates that this pattern of behavior has not changed much. For decades, Paducah workers were not told they were being exposed to dangerous radioisotopes such as plutonium-239, neptunium-237 and technetium-99. The government and its contractors chose not to tell them because they feared the workers would seek compensation for harm to health and the unions would demand hazardous-duty pay. In February, the Post revealed that an unknown number of nuclear weapons components are buried and stored at Paducah, posing additional risks to workers there.
From the dawn of the nuclear age, researchers recognized that the risks posed to nuclear weapons workers over time were poorly understood. Robert Stone, head of the health division of the Manhattan Project, noted shortly after the war that worker radiation protection ... rested on rather poor experimental evidence." He concluded, "The whole clinical study of the personnel is one vast experiment. Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation."
Beginning in the mid-1970s, studies of DOE workers engendered considerable controversy, in large part because of concerns over the DOE's conflict of interest as an employer. The person who sparked the controversy was Thomas Mancuso, a quiet, unassuming researcher. The Atomic Energy Commission approached Mancuso in 1964 to study the potential long-term health impact on workers at several government nuclear facilities. As an AEC advisor described it, "Much of the motivation for starting this study arose from the 'political need' for assurance that AEC employees were not suffering harmful effects."
But instead of reducing pressures in the AEC, the research Mancuso did with Alice Stewart and George Kneale only exacerbated matters. Indeed, the DOE, the AEC's successor, expressed its ingratitude for their groundbreaking work by terminating their research contract.
In 1990, the DOE was forced by Congress to turn over data from other DOE sites to Stewart, who had, along with her colleagues, continued the research with independent funding. The same year, also as a result of congressional pressure and a growing lack of public trust, the DOE entered into a formal agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services to manage and conduct DOE worker health studies. Yet these studies have been obscured from public attention, largely because the controversy within the DOE had died down.
As the DOE confronts its nuclear legacy, the pattern established by Marie Curie is repeating itself. First, the early warning signs appear -- as when young journalist Florence Pfaltzgraph in 1926 told Curie about the young women at a radium plant in Essex, N.J., who were dying from necrosis of the jaw after blithely ingesting deadly amounts of radium, which their managers had told them would add to their vitality.
Today, the signs are still either ignored or attacked as not being credible. Then official disbelief sets in until the evidence becomes overwhelming. (Curie herself refused to accept that radiation had anything to do with the New Jersey tragedies, only to die herself less than a decade later of bone marrow cancer.) By the time officials acknowledge the problem, it's too late.
Even though the American victims of the Cold War have a powerful supporter in Energy Secretary Richardson, he will soon be gone, perhaps even before the end of the Clinton adminstration. In his wake, many questions will remain: Will the next Energy secretary be as committed as Richardson to helping the sick workers? Even if Congress enacts compensation legislation this year, will it be enough? And will Congress be willing to continue the program next year? If the DOE is allowed to decide on compensation, will sick workers get as much priority in the next administration as nuclear weapons production and environmental cleanup? What form of justice, if any, America's Cold War veterans will ultimately get? salon.com | April 24, 2000
About the writer Robert Alvarez served as senior policy advisor for environment, safety and health to Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
---------
Related Salon stories Mushroom cloud over Denver? A top Department of Energy official is caught on tape worrying that security is lax at Rocky Flats weapons facility. By Mark Hertsgaard 04/12/99
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/04/12/security/index.html
Mushroom cloud over Denver? A top Department of Energy official is caught on tape worrying that security is lax at Rocky Flats weapons facility.
BY MARK HERTSGAARD
April 12, 1999 | What if Timothy McVeigh had attacked Oklahoma City with nuclear rather than conventional explosives? What if the World Trade Center bombers had packed their truck with plutonium rather than the chemical cocktail they used?
Now, transplant those nightmare scenarios to Denver, and put yourself in the mind of Ed McCallum. The year is 1997. McCallum is the Department of Energy's top professional with hands-on responsibility for protecting the nation's vast stores of nuclear weapons-grade materials from theft or sabotage. McCallum has been reviewing the security performance at Rocky Flats, the nuclear site 17 miles northwest of Denver, and he sees the catastrophe of the century waiting to happen, on his watch.
"The workers at that plant, and the citizens of Colorado, are at extremely high risk" of a terrorist assault that could unleash "a little mushroom-shaped cloud" over Denver, McCallum confided in a phone call to a colleague that May. Such a blast would not only kill Denver's million-plus inhabitants, it would claim tens of millions of additional lives as its radioactive plume blew across the Midwest and on to the East Coast.
Not long after that phone call, Mark Graf, a security expert at Rocky Flats, agreed at McCallum's urging to blow the whistle on security lapses at the site. Now, in an ongoing legal wrangle about his whistle-blowing with his employer, Wackenhut Services, the company in charge of security at Rocky Flats, Graf and his attorneys have released a tape recording of the phone call in which Ed McCallum voiced his fears about security at Rocky Flats. It provides a disturbing window on the DOE's own worries about Rocky Flats.
The phone call was between McCallum and Jeff Peters, the former director of Protective Force Operations at Rocky Flats. As the man formerly in charge of the entire uniformed protective force on site, Peters had extensive firsthand knowledge of security deficiencies at Rocky Flats; indeed, he had butted heads about them for years with his bosses at Wackenhut before finally blowing the whistle to federal authorities himself and resigning under duress in 1996.
McCallum telephoned Peters because he wanted Peters' help bringing the problems at Rocky Flats into the open before tragedy struck. McCallum, as the director of DOE's Office of Safeguards and Security, had recently rated security at Rocky Flats as "unsatisfactory" in his confidential 1996 annual report to the president. (The DOE's security rating system has but three categories: satisfactory, marginal and unsatisfactory.)
In their phone call, which Peters taped, McCallum said he wanted Peters and Graf to start talking to the news media about the problems at the site. McCallum had been trying to warn superiors in the Clinton administration about the impending danger at Rocky Flats but with little success. If the media got interested in the story, though, the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington would have to do something.
Peters shared McCallum's concerns, and the two men went on to discuss some specific problems at Rocky Flats. Recently conducted internal tests had shown that the facility was highly susceptible to terrorist attack. In the tests, the "bad guys" had succeeded 100 percent of the time in entering the complex and gaining access to the approximately 20 tons of nuclear weapons-grade materials stored inside. (It takes only a softball-sized chunk of plutonium to create an explosion equivalent to three or four Hiroshima blasts.)
Once inside of Rocky Flats, McCallum observed, terrorists would only need to slap some high explosives on the nuclear materials, light a fuse and voilà: "a little mushroom-shaped cloud" would soon be rising over Denver and heading across the United States. Of course, the terrorists could also steal the nuclear materials and detonate them elsewhere. The bad guys had succeeded 80 percent of the time with that scenario in the recent tests.
McCallum said he could not understand why people living near Rocky Flats had not "gone absolutely wacko" about the danger. Peters replied, "It's only because they don't know ... they're being fed a line of shit the whole time."
Indeed, the American people almost never hear such brutal candor from their public servants; government officials only talk this honestly among themselves (and rarely even then). McCallum plainly never intended his comments to reach the public's ears. In a brief conversation with Salon News, McCallum said, "I've been officially told by my agency [DOE] that I'm not allowed to comment." He did say, however, that he had not known that Peters was recording their May 1997 phone call, and that he considers the release of the tapes, and indeed the taping itself, illegal, though he does not disagree with the larger point Peters and Graf are making with the tapes. (Peters vigorously disputed that McCallum did not know about the taping, the legality of which was affirmed in advance, according to Peters, by both the FBI and the DOE's Office of General Counsel.)
In any case, the tapes became the smoking gun of a legal hearing just concluded in Denver that may determine whether the American public ever learns the full truth about Rocky Flats. The hearing, which has gone uncovered by the mainstream media, pits Mark Graf against his employer, Wackenhut Services.
In March 1998, Graf, by then a 16-year veteran of security work at Rocky Flats, sued Wackenhut for allegedly retaliating against him for speaking out about security flaws at the plant. Among other actions, Wackenhut suspended Graf from his position and ordered him to undergo psychological evaluation. Graf won his lawsuit when the Department of Labor ruled that Wackenhut's retaliation was illegal; the department ordered the company to reinstate Graf, purge all references to the incident from his record and pay him $10,000 in damages, plus attorney's fees.
At last week's hearing, Wackenhut sought to overturn that ruling by arguing that Graf did not come to Wackenhut's classification office for clearance before talking with the media. "Wackenhut feels the clear issue here is that there is a DOE rule requiring that people who work at DOE sites must first go through the classification office before talking to the news media in order to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of classified info," Dennis Brown, Wackenhut's attorney, told Salon News. "Wackenhut's position is that if you want to work at a DOE site, you've got to follow their rules, and furthermore, that Graf wasn't discriminated against, he was simply disciplined for refusing to follow this rule."
Graf was represented at the Denver hearing by the Government Accountability Project, a public interest law firm that specializes in defending corporate and government whistle-blowers. GAP attorney Tom Carpenter argued that Graf is a trained de-classifier whom Wackenhut had repeatedly relied upon for classification advice in numerous other instances, and that Graf therefore knew full well that the material he was sharing with the media did not violate classification restrictions. To require Graf to clear any outside statements with Wackenhut in advance, Carpenter contended, would effectively grant the company veto power over any whistle-blowing by any of its employees.
To punish Graf for speaking to the news media would be all the more unfair, argued Peters, when Graf was specifically urged to do so by DOE's McCallum. "I've sat on these tapes for years and tried to address these security issues through the system, so we didn't panic the public," Peters told Salon News. But without the release of the tapes, Wackenhut and DOE could get away with denying that Graf's concerns about Rocky Flats security had any validity.
"There have been various questions raised about the security posture at Rocky Flats," acknowledges Patrick Etchart, a spokesman for the Department of Energy at Rocky Flats. "There have been several reviews of this issue, and these reviews have consistently concluded that the plutonium and other special nuclear materials at Rocky Flats are not at risk." Asked whether the DOE disputed McCallum's 1997 statements about an "extremely high risk" of a "mushroom-shaped cloud" appearing over Denver, Etchart said, "I can only refer to the independent reviews I already mentioned ... We spend in excess of $60 million a year to make sure this material is safe, and none of the reviews have ever indicated the material was at immediate risk."
In particular, Etchart cites a review of Rocky Flats security initiated by former Denver-area Rep. David Skaggs in October 1998. The review, says Etchart, was conducted by four independent experts who were completely outside of DOE's control and it found that the site was "not at risk."
"The experts who visited Rocky Flats last year didn't give them a rosy report," counters GAP's Tom Carpenter. "It was a mixed review that found there were significant problems in some aspects of the facility and in other aspects not. But did those independent experts talk to key people like Mark Graf, Jeff Peters, David Ridenour and other whistle-blowers who had important information about security deficiencies at Rocky Flats? No."
Graf and Peters aren't the only whistle-blowers who've alleged security deficiencies exist at Rocky Flats. When David Ridenour came to Rocky Flats in February 1997 to serve as DOE's on-site director of security, he boasted 20 years of experience as an Air Force weapons officer and engineer. But after a mere three months, Ridenour resigned "in disgust," as he wrote in a letter to Secretary of Energy Federico Peña. Ridenour complained that Wackenhut Services was operating security with little or no government oversight, and he charged he had been told not to let security concerns interfere with the contractor's profits.
"Never before ... in my career have I ever been placed in a position where loyalty to my supervision and my requirement to protect the public health and safety were placed in direct opposition," wrote Ridenour, who added, "I feel that conflict today."
Ridenour's letter was Exhibit A in the evidence that Ed McCallum wanted Peters and Graf to leak to the news media in May 1997. By then, Graf and Peters had been working internally for years, trying to persuade Wackenhut to upgrade security at Rocky Flats. In 1996, Graf and Peters drafted an eight-page classified memo outlining numerous specific vulnerabilities at Rocky Flats that, if exploited, could result in catastrophic consequences. When Wackenhut management took no action about their memo, Graf and Peters notified the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. An internal review was undertaken by DOE, but McCallum warned Peters that the agency "was going to take a dodge on it."
Meanwhile, security readiness at Rocky Flats continued to deteriorate, according to McCallum. In his 1996 annual report to the president, McCallum had warned that budget cuts had diminished security at Rocky Flats to "a hollow force," making the site the least secure of all 12 of the nuclear weapons sites overseen by DOE. In his May 1997 phone call to Peters, McCallum said he had told Washington, "'We've lost 42 percent of our protective forces and 50 percent of our SWAT capability ... at a time when we've increased our holdings [of nuclear weapons-grade materials] by 70 metric tons. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this one out.'"
In response to McCallum's entreaties, Graf and Peters agreed to talk to reporters about Rocky Flats, with the understanding that they would not divulge classified information in the process. Stories duly began appearing in the Denver Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and other major papers and on "The CBS Evening News." The flurry of news coverage got Wackenhut's attention. According to Graf's lawyer, Tom Carpenter, Graf became "a victim of harassment and intimidation by Wackenhut. He has been subjected to psychological evaluation; placed on administrative leave for over eight months; and threatened that any additional disclosures would result in his termination."
Dennis Brown, Wackenhut's lawyer, concedes that Graf was sent for psychological evaluation and that the step may sound "Stalinistic" but says there were valid reasons. When Graf admitted he had not cleared his media appearances with the classification office despite knowing the DOE required him to do so, Brown explains, it made his boss "wonder whether he could trust Graf in the future ... [his boss was also] concerned about Graf's emotional state, because he felt Graf was demonstrating some disturbing behavior -- inability to sleep at night, anxiety and so forth -- and [the boss] wanted to make sure this guy was stable enough to hold the kind of security job he did."
Brown insists further that Graf is entirely wrong to suggest that Wackenhut did not take his security concerns seriously. "Graf's concerns have been reviewed no less than 10 or 20 times in the last couple years by various committees, and they have concluded Rocky Flats is not at risk," says Brown. "I don't doubt Graf's sincerity, or Ed McCallum's, but I believe these committees. Also, you've got to remember McCallum's remarks from the phone call of May 1997 are dated now. Since then, improvements have been made, to where the most recent report to the president lists Rocky Flats security as 'satisfactory.'"
In response, GAP lawyer Carpenter asks how the public can trust DOE's assurances that all is now well at the plant in light of DOE's reluctance to admit previous problems there and its ongoing efforts to silence employees or contractors like Graf. The DOE has provided financial support to Wackenhut for its legal appeal against Graf, and it refused to allow key witnesses like McCallum to testify at last week's hearing.
Jeff Peters, meanwhile, points out that, "the same problems we were discussing in 1997 -- of terrorists being able to get in and have extended access to the nuclear material -- still pertain. And now you have the guard force cut in half, to less than 250 guards, they still haven't upgraded their alarm system -- in fact, they've canceled the project -- and they have torn down the outer gates and fences around the facility to make access easier and quicker."
The loss of those barriers, Peters says, means a truck could force its way into Rocky Flats, get to within 75 yards of a building containing tons of nuclear weapons-grade material and then be detonated, "just like that van of Timothy McVeigh's was detonated in Oklahoma City. That kind of explosion would wipe out the building and the nuclear material inside would vent into the atmosphere. And that would make Chernobyl look like a picnic." salon.com | April 12, 1999
About the writer Mark Hertsgaard, a frequent contributor to Salon, is the author of four books, including "Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future" (Broadway Books, 1999).
----
Ground Zero A writer discovers the resiliency of life in the atomic testing grounds of the American Southwest.
By Ellen Meloy
2/24/99
http://www.salon.com/wlust/pass/1999/02/24pass.html
----
USEC Inc.
PUBLIC COMPANIES: ENERGY
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page F20 Washington Post
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/025l-042400-idx.html
6903 Rockledge Dr.
Bethesda, Md. 20817
301-564-3200
www.usec.com
Founded: 1998
Fiscal year: June 30
Revenue: $1.5 billion
Net income: $152.4 million
Earnings per share: $1.52
Dividend: $1.10
Stockholders' equity: $1.1 billion
Return on equity: 13 percent
Stock: USU (NYSE)
Assets: $2.4 billion
Market capitalization: $362.2 million
52-week high: $14.87 1/2 (6/30/1999)
52-week low: $3.43 3/4 (2/29/2000)
President and CEO: William H. Timbers
Executive vice president: James H. Miller
Employees: 3,878
Local employees: 156
DESCRIPTION: USEC (formerly U.S. Enrichment Corp., a federal corporation) is the world's leading seller of uranium enrichment services to commercial nuclear power plants. Among its businesses is the "megatons to megawatts" program in which it buys uranium that Russia has diluted from the highly enriched uranium in nuclear warheads and sells it to nuclear power plant customers, including Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. The company supplies about three-fourths of the domestic market and one-third of the world market for uranium enrichment services.
DEVELOPMENTS: Last year was full of troubles for USEC. In June the company announced that it would scrap a technology that was supposed to hold the key to its future. The company said that the returns weren't sufficient to warrant the $120 million a year it had been investing.
Then last fall, less than two years after it was sold to shareholders through a stock offering engineered by the Clinton administration, USEC asked Congress and the White House for as much as $200 million in relief, arguing that it was losing money because of a deal that requires it to buy processed uranium from Russia. That pitch met with little sympathy, given that the company was spending $100 million to buy back its shares and paying investors a dividend of about the same amount. At one point, USEC told the Clinton administration and Congress that it might quit its role as the government's executive agent in the "megatons to megawatts" nuclear nonproliferation deal with Russia. The administration began negotiating with potential competitors to take over the role, and USEC backed down.
At the same time it was dealing with financial troubles, the company was dealing with the aftermath of a Washington Post investigation that revealed that thousands of uranium workers at its Paducah, Ky., plant were exposed to radioactive materials without their knowledge when the plant was still a government facility. USEC did not exist when the problems originated in the 1950s and was not liable for the claims.
The company took several steps to reduce its costs, including eliminating Lockheed Martin Corp. as the middleman operator of the plants and restructuring its contracts with utilities that operate a power plant that supplies electricity for its operations.
In February of this year, the company's board voted to jettison 20 percent of its work force, slash its dividend in half and buy back 20 million more shares of its stock. Now USEC is undergoing scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where critics of the privatization are investigating whether it has jeopardized national security and whether USEC's actions since privatization have threatened the viability of the domestic uranium industry....
---
Dominion Resources Inc.
LARGEST VIRGINIA COMPANIES OUTSIDE THE AREA
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page F48
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/037l-042400-idx.html
120 Tredegar St.
Richmond, Va. 23219
804-819-2000
www.domres.com
Founded: 1909
Fiscal year: Dec. 31
Revenue: $5.5 billion
Net income: $296.0 million
Earnings per share: $1.55
Dividend: $2.58
Stockholders' equity: $4.8 billion
Return on equity: 6 percent
Stock: D (NYSE)
Assets: $17.7 billion
Market capitalization: $10.4 billion
52-week high: $49.37 1/2 (11/5/1999)
52-week low: $34.81 1/2 (3/1/2000)
President and CEO: Thomas E. Capps
Executive vice president and CFO: Edgar M. Roach Jr.
Employees: 11,035
DESCRIPTION: Dominion Resources distributes electricity to 2 million customers in Virginia and North Carolina and natural gas to another 2 million in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. It is the holding company of Virginia Power.
DEVELOPMENTS: Last year was one of mergers and acquisitions for Dominion. In May it made an $8.4 billion stock purchase of Pittsburgh-based Consolidated Natural Gas. And early this year Energy Nuclear of Jackson, Miss., beat out Dominion in a bidding war for two nuclear reactors owned by the New York Power Authority.
In January, after finalizing its purchase of Consolidated, Dominion divided itself into three lines of business: electricity generation, gas and electric delivery, and oil and gas exploration and production. The move was designed to make the businesses more nimble in an era of deregulation and competition. The company has announced plans to sell its financial-services subsidiary.
---
Constellation Energy Group Inc.
LARGEST MARYLAND COMPANIES OUTSIDE THE AREA
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page F51
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/038l-042400-idx.html
39 W. Lexington St.
Baltimore, Md. 21201
410-234-5678
www.constellationenergy.com
Founded: 1816
Fiscal year: Dec. 31
Revenue: $3.8 billion
Net income: $260.1 million
Earnings per share: $1.74
Dividend: $1.68
Stockholders' equity: $3.0 billion
Return on equity: 8 percent
Stock: CEG (NYSE)
Assets: $9.7 billion
Market capitalization: $5.0 billion
52-week high: $34.43 3/4 (4/14/2000)
52-week low: $25.12 1/2 (4/15/1999)
Chairman, president and CEO: Christian H. Poindexter
Vice chairman: Edward A. Crooke
Employees: 7,401
DESCRIPTION: Constellation Energy Group is a newly formed holding company for Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.
DEVELOPMENTS: On May 3 shares of BGE were automatically converted to an equal number of shares in Constellation Energy Group. But Constellation endured a difficult first year. It was marked by power outages caused by severe weather--a July heat wave, two September hurricanes and a January ice storm. The company also endured the deregulation of Maryland's utility industry that brought competition to a market that BGE had dominated. As of July 1, electric customers in Maryland will be able to select their power companies as they do their long-distance telephone companies.
In June 1999, BGE said its residential customers would see a 6.5 percent rate reduction under a plan related to the deregulation. Customers will pay, on average, $65 to $70 a year less for electricity over the next six years.
In September, BGE came under criticism for its perceived shortcomings during and after Hurricane Floyd. The storm, which battered the Eastern Seaboard, left millions of residents without power for more than a week, including 490,000 in BGE's service area. The outages spurred Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) to demand a full accounting of the utility's performance during the storm.
Also last year, BGE filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to re-license its Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Calvert County. The current licenses for Calvert Cliffs don't expire until 2014 and 2016, but BGE sought early renewal and the application was accepted last month.
-------- kentucky
Paducah could lead nation in hazardous waste cleanup
April 24, 2000,
Paducah Sun
http://www.paducahsun.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?/200004/24+00kc_editorial.htm l+20000424+editorial
EDITOR: The federal court lawsuit at our gaseous diffusion plant opens the whole can of worms of cleanup, lays it out before us. Fortunately, because of this litigation, we are not going to be passed by, left with radiated piles of debris to fester into the distant future, forgotten by the outside world. Is cleanup a powerful job producer? There has been a start. Could it become more so? I do believe â€" yes. But only if we want to swing around and attack it full bore.
The Sun has touched on areas of concern that rile the newspaper staff, such as the radiated groundwater. Well, how about hammering away at the Sun's cleanup focus points for starters.
To get better mental focus, energies, inspirations, corporate organizations zeroing in harder â€" heck, there's a whole peacetime mobilization waiting to be stirred up for nuclear cleanup across the country; whole disciplines of inventive genius to be corralled and put on the trail, encouraged on (which we are not doing with negative sniping).
I am told that there are scientists finding super bugs in volcanoes, super hot spots around the world that withstand radiation, consume radiated materials at low levels, reduce radiation in dissipation and dispersion to safe background levels.
Is this my imagination or did I read it somewhere in responsible journals? Well, perhaps a quick dead end. But there is always need for positive continuing public education to keep building confidence that the challenges are being effectively and efficiently addressed.
But couldn't we be swinging around here in our region and becoming leaders in the nation on exploring cleanup of nuclear and other hazardous waste sites? To my knowledge, there is no true center for this anywhere in the world. Information Age Park could be filled with bio and chem explorers and mappers of less expensive ways to go. Our higher learning institutions could boom with the searching.
Even the big engineering consortiums that are into this work around the world admit that current structures of effort in hazardous target areas are so costly that we will be centuries going at it with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars. Maybe that will be the reality. But meanwhile we can sure swing on to the target of cleanup here full bore and the job- creating, dedicated pleasure that comes with enthusiastically taking on a job that needs doing, a job needing to be done very well â€" with Kentucky inventiveness, ingenuity and pride.
TOM BARLOW
Paducah
----
Letter to the Editor
Paducah Gas Diffusion plant contamination and clean up
Date: 4/24/00
From: Magnu96196
To: mthrower@paducahsun.com
Dear Editor,
I have read the Sun's reporting of the DOE's Paducah plant with interest since the news broke last year. I live near a similar DOE plant in Oak Ridge with many health problems from decades of poor operation and management of the plant, which was eventually shut down.
Here we have serious problems with fluoride releases to air. The plants UF-6 loses to air produce HF and fluorides dusts in the air that get into the workers lungs and seriously damage their immune systems, thyroid, bone, etc. Fluorides are also in the surface and ground waters, and are very toxic and cumulative poisons. This information appears lacking in the Sun's reporting and from other sources driving the Paducah health concerns, and I don't think Paducah's plant did any better than Oak Ridge's as they were operated by the same folks and used the same equipment.
When our gas diffusion plant went thru upgades with higher HP compressors in the 80's, the systems lost even more UF-6 into the air. In timing with this, the area pine trees began to die off. With the operation of an incinerator here that burned uranyl fluorides even more pine trees died off and pointed directly at the incinerator's plume. The managers here tried to pass off this environmental damage as bugs, but they omitted that chemical damage weakened the trees to allow this to happen. DOE reports in half truths here, all the time.
DOE and its contractors around Oak Ridge have zero creadibilty for all the health and environmental cover ups that happen here, and I see more of the same happening in Paducah. Add to this the foot dragging on diagnosis and reporting of worker illnesses, many of which are obviously tied to HF exposures, and there is no credibilty left. We have found down here if things are going to get done--each person has to step up and take hold of the problems and force the issues to prevent the denials of DOE and its minions.
Reports from the 40's exist that show that in gas diffusion plants the fluorine atoms are a thousand times more prevalent than the uranium ones in worker exposures. Many of the health symptoms also match that long connected with HF releasing industries. DOE knows this effect dominates health effects, and its not reporting it.
Currently, the high focus on just radiation at these plants appears to hide the most significant toxic emission that not only have affected the worker health, but the entire communities that have been impacted.
The current compensation proposed for these workers won't even cover their medical bills in many cases, and it leaves they and their families stranded. This appears more a quick bribe to try and quench these problems before the election year. Where did the bribe offer come from, the Executive White House and the offices of Al Gore? It is time for full accountabilty of DOE and its friends in the White House and for all to come clean on the gas diffusion health disaster.
Sincerely, Jim Phelps, former ORNL Sr. Dev. Engr.
-------- new mexico
Water woes
ENN News
News Bytes
Monday, April 24, 2000
http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2000/04/04242000/newsbytes.asp
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories are hoping that technology for removing toxins from groundwater contaminated by nuclear waste may also shed light on how to remove arsenic from well water in Bangladesh. Wells in the Asian country are slowly poisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of people. This spring, Sandia geochemist Pat Brady will meet with scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency to discuss the origins of arsenic in Bangladesh wells in an effort to stop the poisoning. Brady was invited to join the IAEA effort because of his work in natural attenuation. a naturally occurring process that absorbs soluble heavy metals onto a mineral surface. Scientists speculate that a mirror image of the process is feeding arsenic to the wells in Bangladesh, and that mineral uptake might be used to remove arsenic from drinking water. For more information, contact Chris Burroughs at (505)844-0948 or send e-mail to: coburro@sandia.gov.
Sandia National Laboratories: http://www.sandia.gov
International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.org
-------- utah
No travel of N-waste via Utah
Clinton likely to veto bill allowing storage in Nevada
By Jerry Spangler,
April 25, 2000, spang@desnews.com,
Deseret News staff writer, and Associated Press and Reuters
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,165007394,00.html?
The rumble of trucks and trains laden with thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel will not be echoing through Utah anytime soon.
President Clinton on Tuesday was expected to veto a bill that would have allowed temporary storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., as early as 2007. Yucca Mountain is also the site where federal officials have planned to open a permanent nuclear waste storage site by 2010.
Any efforts to ship the nation's stockpile of 400,000 metric tons of nuclear waste to Nevada would have direct impacts on Utah. In fact, as much as 95 percent of the nation's nuclear waste, generated mostly from 80 nuclear reactors in 40 states, would pass through Utah on its way to the Nevada site about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"The president will veto that bill," White House spokesman Jake Siewert said.
"We believe that we have the votes to sustain a veto on it because it poses a threat to the environment. I expect that will be the end of it."
The veto will have no effect on efforts by a consortium of mostly Eastern utility companies to temporarily store the waste on Goshute tribal lands 40 miles west of Salt Lake City.
"It does not change our plans at all," said Scott Northard, project manager for Private Fuel Storage. "The interim storage we are proposing is designed specifically to give us flexibility to store the waste until a permanent facility is ready. We are proceeding on the assumption that (a permanent facility) won't be ready until 2010 at the earliest and maybe 2015 before it is fully operational."
Northard said Clinton's veto is unfortunate because it would have accelerated a solution to the nagging national problem of what to do with nuclear waste now stored at reactor sites never intended for long-term storage of waste.
But environmentalists and Indian activists praised the presidential veto.
"As I understand the bill, Congress is trying to short-circuit some of the safety net built into it (eventual authorization of a permanent storage facility)," said Duncan Steadman, an attorney representing Goshute tribal members opposed to a temporary nuclear waste dump in Skull Valley.
"If Yucca Mountain does not have the full range of public hearings, then it becomes less viable and that creates more of a problem for our clients. We are opposed to anything that would short-circuit the safety nets designed to protect the public from nuclear waste" regardless of where the waste is stored.
Steve Erickson with Utah Downwinders said the veto was the right thing for Clinton to do, and he criticized Utah's congressional delegation for supporting the temporary waste storage at Yucca Mountain.
"Our delegation is mistaken in thinking that by foisting the nuclear waste on Nevada that it will somehow prevent storage of that waste from taking place in Utah," he said. "PFS has made it abundantly clear they intend to proceed regardless of what may transpire with Yucca Mountain storage."
The Republican majority is likely a few votes short of overriding the presidential veto. The Senate vote to pass the bill was three short of a veto-proof majority.
That has House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, describing the current storage situation as "a tragedy waiting to happen."
The Clinton administration objects to several portions of the bill, including a provision blocking Energy Department responsibility for the nuclear waste in the years before a repository is built.
"We don't think it (the bill) adequately addresses some of the safety and environmental concerns that we've had," Siewert said. He said the Republican-dominated Congress has repeatedly failed to take those concerns into account.
The nuclear industry has backed the legislation, while environmentalists believe Yucca Mountain is unsafe and that the measure would mean trucks and trains would be hauling nuclear waste past the homes and work places of 50 million Americans.
The White House has opposed the legislation partly because the bill raises questions about the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to independently determine radiation exposure standards for a future Yucca Mountain underground repository.
Likewise, Utah officials have vowed to fight the proposed temporary storage of nuclear waste in Skull Valley.
A draft environmental impact statement of the PFS proposal is expected by early June, and public hearings on the EIS and a safety evaluation are expected by late June.
-------- washington
Hanford Tank Cleanup Now $15.2B
APRIL 24, 23:41 EDT
By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS742H7MO0
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - The cost of cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation's highly radioactive nuclear waste storage tanks has jumped to $15.2 billion - more than twice the original estimate, the contractor estimated Monday.
Earlier this month, the BNFL Inc. had offered a nearly $13 billion estimate, up from an initial price tag of $6.9 billion.
``We recognize that the new price in all likelihood is not affordable,'' said Paul Miskimin, president of BNFL, which is based in Fairfax, Va.
The company's bid was based on spending $6 billion worth of private money to build a factory to turn Hanford wastes into a glass-like substance for storage.
The estimated cost of designing, building, operating and then deactivating the plant over the 20-year life of the proposed contract is now calculated at $15.2 billion, with the financing costs on the $6 billion accounting for about half the total, BNFL said.
``Few people now believe this is the right way to finance this job,'' Miskimin said. The company is looking for ways to reduce the financing costs, presumably by using tax money for at least part of the job.
Under terms the Department of Energy set for bidders, the federal government would not pay a penny to the builder until the first glass is produced, sometime in 2007. That means the winning bidder would pay all the upfront costs.
Earlier this month, Mike Lawrence, the general manager of the project, resigned, saying he was frustrated he didn't have direct control over key portions of the troubled program.
Monday was the deadline for BNFL to submit its proposal to the Energy Department, which owns Hanford.
The 54 million gallons of radioactive waste are in 177 giant underground storage tanks. They are leftovers from the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The sprawling Hanford reservation is 120 miles southwest of Spokane, near Richland.
Officials for the Department of Energy and the state Department of Ecology could not be reached for comment late Monday.
-------- us nuc waste
Clinton To Veto Nuclear Waste Bill
April 24, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Nuclear-Waste.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton is poised to veto legislation that would have allowed storage of thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the Nevada desert.
Clinton promised weeks ago to veto the bill, and the White House said he would carry it out Tuesday. The legislation passed the House on a 253-167 vote in March, and the Senate 64-34 a month earlier; At least two-thirds of those voting are required for an override.
The bill requires that shipments of used nuclear fuel, building up at reactors in 31 states, begin to be shipped to Nevada in 2007, once the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves a license for a permanent waste site in the state.
The White House has opposed the legislation partly because the bill raises questions about the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to independently determine radiation exposure standards for a future Yucca Mountain underground repository.
The NRC is expected to decide as early as 2006 on whether the Yucca Mountain underground nuclear waste repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas should be licensed. Now under scientific review, the site is proposed for opening in 2010. State officials have pledged to fight it.
-------- us nuc weapons
U.S. Upgrading W-76 Warheads
U.S. Nuclear Stockpile Plans Draw Scrutiny
Navy Upgrading Warheads as Talks With Russia Seek Further Arms Reduction
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 24, 2000; Page A02
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/110l-042400-idx.htmlhttp://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/24/110l-042400-idx.html
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200004/24+usrussian042400_news.html+20000424
While U.S. and Russian negotiators work on a new treaty to sharply reduce strategic nuclear weapons, the Navy is upgrading a 20-year-old submarine-launched warhead to enable it to destroy any remaining super-hardened Russian missile silos, according to government officials and private analysts.
More than 2,000 of the aging W-76 warheads will soon be going through the Energy Department's service-life extension program to be put back in submarines beginning in 2005.
Each warhead now has a destructive power more than three times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. After they are refurbished with new arming, fusing and firing systems, the W-76 warheads will have a greater destructive effect on their buried, reinforced targets than when they first went to sea in 1977.
As the number of strategic land- and sub-based intercontinental ballistic missiles is reduced, "the U.S. must maintain the number of hard-target killers we have on alert," a senior Pentagon officer with responsibility for nuclear weapons said recently. Upgrading the W-76 warheads is in line with that need, he said.
At a conference on the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York this week, officials expect delegates from the signatory countries to raise questions about the upgrading of the U.S. stockpile. The delegates will review the records of Russia and the United States in moving toward elimination of nuclear weapons, as envisioned by the 1968 treaty.
Although the United States and Russia have both ratified START II (strategic arms reduction treaty) and are working on START III, both nations are expected to draw criticism from other signatory countries for not disarming fast enough and for keeping stockpiles of thousands of warheads.
The Russian decision to store rather than destroy 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons it has withdrawn from deployment will be a subject of concern at the New York conference. Nations in Asia and Europe, where such weapons could be used, are particularly critical of Russia's refusal to destroy the battlefield nuclear weapons. Then-President Mikhail Gorbachev took the weapons out of deployment in Eastern Europe in response to the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical weapons from Europe and Asia.
Delegates to the conference are also expected to complain about U.S. plans to refurbish and upgrade its 6,000 deployed strategic warheads, such as the W-76, and Washington's intention to maintain in an "inactive reserve" weapons withdrawn from deployment when START II's limit of 3,500 warheads goes into effect.
Questions will also be raised about Washington's "war reserve" of 4,000 plutonium triggers, taken from dismantled weapons, which could be converted into nuclear warheads within a year. Triggers from U.S. tactical weapons withdrawn from Europe in 1991 are in that reserve.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is to speak to the New York conference and release a report defending the U.S. approach to disarmament. State Department spokesman James P. Rubin told reporters Thursday that "the United States has led the way amongst the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race."
The START III negotiations, which got underway in Geneva last week, are based on an agreement reached in Helsinki in 1997 between President Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, then Russian president. The two leaders not only agreed to reduce deployed warheads to between 2,000 and 2,500, but also to take steps to destroy "strategic nuclear warheads."
Russia plans to make an issue of U.S. stockpile practices based on the Helsinki agreement, according to government sources. The Russians believe one flaw in START II was that it allowed the United States to store excess warheads rather than destroy them, according to Alexander Pikayev, an arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
U.S. stockpile practices have drawn little attention on Capitol Hill or from the public at large.
"Despite its potential adverse effects on . . . arms control and disarmament efforts, there has been no public or congressional debate over upgrading warheads or the gratuitous modification and novel design of nuclear explosives," said Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, in a recent article about the W-76 upgrade in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Congressional testimony on the fiscal 2001 budget infrequently touched on the nation's strategic nuclear weapons program, which costs roughly $30 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Buried in testimony of Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Gioconda, the acting director of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, is the one mention of the W-76--in a list of three deployed warheads that will be refurbished. The main thrust of Gioconda's testimony was to assure members of Congress that U.S. weapons would still work, not that they would be more effective.
----
Refurbishing of the W-76--three times more destructive than the bomb used on Hiroshima--comes amid talks with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons.
Monday, April 24, 2000
By WALTER PINCUS,
Washington Post
http://www.latimes.com/editions/orange/ocnews/20000424/t000038665.html
WASHINGTON--While U.S. and Russian negotiators work on a new treaty to sharply reduce strategic nuclear weapons, the Navy is upgrading a 20-year-old submarine-launched warhead to enable it to destroy any remaining super-hardened Russian missile silos, according to government officials and private analysts.
More than 2,000 of the aging W-76 warheads will soon be going through the Energy Department's service life extension program to be put back in submarines beginning in 2005.
Each warhead now has a destructive power more than three times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. After they are refurbished with new arming, fusing and firing systems, the W-76 warheads will have a greater destructive effect on their buried, reinforced targets than when they first went to sea in 1977.
As the number of strategic land- and sub-based intercontinental ballistic missiles is reduced, "the U.S. must maintain the number of hard-target killers we have on alert," a senior Pentagon officer with responsibility for nuclear weapons said recently. Upgrading the W-76 warheads is in line with that need, he said.
At a conference on the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York this week, delegates from the signatory countries are expected to raise questions about the upgrading of the U.S. stockpile. The delegates will review the records of Russia and the United States in moving toward elimination of nuclear weapons, as envisioned by the 1968 treaty.
Although the United States and Russia have both ratified START II (strategic arms reduction treaty) and are working on START III, both nations are expected to draw criticism from other signatory countries for not disarming fast enough and for keeping stockpiles of thousands of warheads.
The Russian decision to store rather than destroy 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons it has withdrawn from deployment will be a subject of concern in the New York conference. Nations in Asia and Europe, where such weapons could be used, are particularly critical of Russia's refusal to destroy the battlefield nuclear weapons. Then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev took the weapons out of deployment in Eastern Europe in response to the United States' unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical weapons from Europe and Asia.
Delegates to the conference are also expected to complain about U.S. plans to refurbish and upgrade its 6,000 deployed strategic warheads, such as the W-76, and Washington's intention to maintain in an "inactive reserve" weapons withdrawn from deployment when START II's limit of 3,500 warheads goes into effect.
Questions will also be raised about Washington's "war reserve" of 4,000 plutonium triggers, taken from dismantled weapons, which could be converted into nuclear warheads within a year. Triggers from U.S. tactical weapons withdrawn from Europe in 1991 are in that reserve.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is to speak to the New York conference and release a report defending the U.S. approach to disarmament. State Department spokesman James Rubin told reporters Thursday that "the United States has led the way among the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race."
The START III negotiations, which got underway in Geneva last week, are based on an agreement reached in Helsinki in 1997 between President Clinton and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The two leaders not only agreed to reduce deployed warheads to between 2,000 and 2,500 but also to take steps to destroy "strategic nuclear warheads."
Russia plans to make an issue of U.S. stockpile practices based on the Helsinki agreement, according to government sources. The Russians believe one flaw in START II was that it allowed the United States to store excess warheads rather than destroy them, according to Alexander Pikayev, an arms expert at the Carnegia Endowment for International Peace.
U.S. stockpile practices have drawn little attention on Capitol Hill or from the public at large.
----
Kirtland Passes Nuke Inspection
Monday, April 24, 2000
By John J. Lumpkin Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/13369news04-24-00.htm
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE - The military caretakers of the nuclear weapons stored here passed a major inspection completed this month, base officials said.
Kirtland, one of two primary nuclear-weapon storage depots in the country, received a "satisfactory" rating from Air Force inspectors, who performed a Nuclear Surety Inspection of Kirtland's 377th Air Base Wing.
Nuclear surety inspections are performed on all "nuclear-capable units" in the Air Force at least every 18 months, according to the Air Force Inspector General. Units receive either "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" ratings, according to a base spokeswoman.
That differs from previous inspections, where units received one of five ratings, ranging from "outstanding" to "unsatisfactory." Kirtland received the second-highest ranking, "excellent," in its inspection in late 1998.
Although inspection results are only partially made public, they are one of the few ways to track the military's safety record with nuclear weapons.
Inspectors looked at everything from administration to security to safety, according to the base's news release. The 377th received passing or better grades in all categories examined, the release says.
"I applaud the professionalism of everyone in the Wing," Col. Richard Stocchetti, the inspection team leader, told the wing's staff last week, according to the release from the base. "Their ability is reflected in the results."
"You've been rewarded for all your hard work," Col. Polly Peyer, the 377th's wing commander, told the troops. "This is a true test of combat readiness."
Kirtland is believed to have the largest number of nuclear weapons kept at a single site in the United States.
The Air Force's policy is to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any specific location, preferring to call them "priority 'A' munitions."
But the independent Natural Resources Defense Council, or the NRDC, estimated some 2,450 nuclear weapons were at Kirtland in 1998. That number is not static, as weapons are frequently moved in and out of the base.
The weapons are directly under the auspices of the 898th Munitions Squadron, part of the 377th, the base's host unit.
The nuclear weapons are kept in the 300,000-square-foot Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex, completed in 1991. They once were stored in bunkers in the Manzano foothills.
Some of the weapons, believed to include cruise missile warheads, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile warheads and gravity bombs, are categorized as in reserve, in storage, or awaiting disarmament.
----
Annan warns of nuclear threat
Monday, 24 April, 2000, 20:17 GMT 21:17 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_724000/724388.stm
The future of the new US defence system remains uncertain UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned of the potential for a new arms race if the United States presses ahead with plans to develop a Star Wars-type national anti-ballistic missile defence shield.
Speaking at the start of a month-long conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, he said the threat of nuclear war remained "a very real, and very terrifying possibility".
Mr Annan said the biggest challenge in nuclear disarmament was the increasing pressure on countries to deploy national defences.
"This pressure is jeopardizing the ABM treaty, which has been called the cornerstone of strategic stability, and could well lead to a new arms race, setbacks for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation and create new incentives for missile proliferation," he said.
"It is my hope that all states will take great care to weigh these dangers and challenges before embarking on a process which may well reduce, rather than enhance, global security," he added.
National defence system
US President Bill Clinton is expected to take a decision about the development of the National Missile Defence system later this year.
US military planners argue that such a Star Wars-type shield would only be used to protect the United States against any missile attack from what it regards as rogue states such as North Korea.
But Russia has also cautioned the US against creating such an anti-ballistic missile system.
Moscow's Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, said it could create what he called "a destructive domino effect" for the existing disarmament system.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty came into force 30 years ago, with the aim of restricting the spread of nuclear weapons beyond nations that already had them in their arsenals.
The treaty has had its successes. South Africa signed up and dismantled its nuclear weapons.
But two years ago, hopes of this success being repeated were shattered when India and Pakistan carried out test explosions.
Mr Annan described the tests as a serious setback for global norms on disarmament.
Strategic superiority
India and Pakistan, together with Cuba and Israel, have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They regard as an attempt to set in stone the strategic superiority of the five major nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, the UK, France and China.
Under the treaty, only these five nations are permitted to possess nuclear weapons.
The other 182 signatories have renounced nuclear weapons for good.
In return, the nuclear powers have promised to move towards eliminating their estimated 20,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons - the vast majority in the United States and Russia.
Moscow's image has improved this month following its ratification of both the Start II arms limitation pact, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
But many non-nuclear states are likely to use the conference to accuse the big powers of foot-dragging on disarmament.
----
UN Chief Criticizes U.S. Missile
By BARRY SCHWEID
April 24, 2000 AP Diplomatic Correspondent
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS742B1200
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday warned that growing pressure to deploy national missile defenses ``could well lead to a new arms race.''
Speaking at a conference of dozens of non-nuclear nations as well as the handful of nuclear-armed states, Annan was responding to those who argue a 1972 treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union to ban anti-missile defenses should be overhauled or even scuttled.
Annan referred to the treaty as a cornerstone of strategic stability and called for ``great care'' before taking steps that ``may well reduce, rather than enhance, global security.''
The Secretary-General made no direct reference to President Clinton's consideration of a limited anti-missile defenses against what administration officials say is a threat of attack by North Korea and other so-called ``rogue states.''
Clinton is expected to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Moscow June 4-5 to cooperate in modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Many conservative Republicans in Congress would go further by scrapping the pact and proceeding with a spaced-based weapons program.
Putin has denounced tinkering with the treaty but in 1997 his presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, agreed to take steps to destroy ``strategic nuclear warheads'' at a Helsinki, Finland, summit with Clinton.
American and Russian negotiators opened talks last week in Geneva, Switzerland, on reducing nuclear stockpiles and defending against nuclear attack.
The U.N. conference was called to review a 1968 treaty signed by 187 countries in which non-nuclear states agreed not to try to develop or acquire nuclear weapons on condition the nuclear nations pursue disarmament. The treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995 with the Clinton administration's strong support.
Nuclear testing by India and Pakistan in 1998 has fueled complaints that the United States, Russia and the others have not taken steps toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Those complaints are expected to be aired during the four-week conference.
A group of seven nations considered politically moderate called for negotiations ``without delay'' to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Foreign Minister Rosario Green of Mexico, presenting the group's ``new agenda,'' proposed that nuclear states pledge not to use nuclear weapons first, as well as speed up the removal of warheads from missile launchers, end of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons and expand nuclear-free zones.
``Failure to move now or to signal new determination to will make these weapons accepted currency,'' Green said.
Fifty-three nations endorsed the agenda advocated by Mexico, New Zeland, Egypt, South Africa, Sweden, Brazil and Ireland.
New Zealand's minister for disarmament and arms control, Matt Robson, backed Annan on anti-missile defenses as a setback to arms control.
``We do think there clearly is a domino effect - that if the U.S. is going to develop such a system, that other countries that have that capacity would look towards that as well,'' he said.
``We believe that's a backward step in terms of being serious about nuclear disarmament,'' he told reporters at a news conference.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was prepared to defend U.S. arms control programs and offer support to a search for steps to advance disarmament. And the U.S. Mission to the United Nations circulated a colorful brochure to the delegates that declared the United States was making a good-faith effort to end the nuclear arms race.
It cited several agreements, a voluntary ban on nuclear weapons tests and support for a halt to the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. The U.S. statement said the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenals has been reduced by 60 percent since the end of the Cold War.
``Some countries have the quite unrealistic notion that disarmament is something that happens overnight,'' State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said last week. ``The fact is that the United States has led the way among the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race.''
In response, Merav Datan, program director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said ``we all recognize that it doesn't happen overnight but the world has been waiting since the formation of the Untied Nations and since nuclear weapons themselves were developed.''
The British-American Security Information Council, a private group that advocates arms control, criticized Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for coming to New York to help raise funds for the Democratic Party but not attending the U.N. conference only a few blocks away.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, due to make his speech to the conference on Tuesday, told reporters he welcomed Annan's statement. Noting the Duma has ratified the 1993 START II treaty to reduce U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads and an international ban on nuclear weapons tests - the Senate refused last year - Ivanov said his government was resolved to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.
----
Annan Says Quest for Missile Defense Could Lead to New Arms Race
April 24, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/24un-nuclear.html
UNITED NATIONS -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday warned that growing pressure to deploy national missile defenses "could well lead to a new arms race."
Speaking at a conference of dozens of non-nuclear nations as well as the handful of nuclear-armed states, Annan was responding to those who argue a 1972 treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union to ban anti-missile defenses should be overhauled or even scuttled.
Annan referred to the treaty as a cornerstone of strategic stability and called for "great care" before taking steps that "may well reduce, rather than enhance, global security."
The Secretary-General made no direct reference to President Clinton's consideration of a limited anti-missile defenses against what administration officials say is a threat of attack by North Korea and other so-called "rogue states."
Clinton is expected to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Moscow June 4-5 to cooperate in modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Many conservative Republicans in Congress would go further by scrapping the pact and proceeding with a spaced-based weapons program.
Putin has denounced tinkering with the treaty but in 1997 his presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, agreed to take steps to destroy "strategic nuclear warheads" at a Helsinki, Finland, summit with Clinton.
American and Russian negotiators opened talks last week in Geneva, Switzerland, on reducing nuclear stockpiles and defending against nuclear attack.
The U.N. conference was called to review a 1968 treaty signed by 187 countries in which non-nuclear states agreed not to try to develop or acquire nuclear weapons on condition the nuclear nations pursue disarmament. The treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995 with the Clinton administration's strong support.
Nuclear testing by India and Pakistan in 1998 has fueled complaints that the United States, Russia and the others have not taken steps toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Those complaints are expected to be aired during the four-week conference.
A group of nations considered politically moderate is calling for negotiations "without delay" to achieve nuclear disarmament.
New Zealand's minister for disarmament and arms control, Matt Robson, backed Annan on anti-missile defenses as a setback to arms control.
"We do think there clearly is a domino effect -- that if the U.S. is going to develop such a system, that other countries that have that capacity would look towards that as well," he said.
"We believe that's a backward step in terms of being serious about nuclear disarmament," he told reporters at a news conference.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was prepared to defend U.S. arms control programs and offer support to a search for steps to advance disarmament.
"Some countries have the quite unrealistic notion that disarmament is something that happens overnight," State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said last week. "The fact is that the United States has led the way among the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race."
In response, Merav Datan, program director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said "we all recognize that it doesn't happen overnight but the world has been waiting since the formation of the Untied Nations and since nuclear weapons themselves were developed."
The British-American Security Information Council, a private group that advocates arms control, criticized Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for coming to New York to help raise funds for the Democratic Party but not attending the U.N. conference only a few blocks away.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, due to make his speech to the conference on Tuesday, told reporters he welcomed Annan's statement. Noting the Duma has ratified the 1993 START II treaty to reduce U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads and an international ban on nuclear weapons tests -- the Senate refused last year -- Ivanov said his government was resolved to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.
----
Curbing the Spread of Nuclear Arms
April 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/00/04/24/editorial/24mon2.html
The past few years have been discouraging ones for efforts to check the spread of nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan have abruptly pushed their way into the club of states possessing such arms. North Korea, Iraq and Iran are pressing against the door. Although 187 countries have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, four, including India and Pakistan, have not, and tougher inspection procedures are needed to make sure that all that have signed fully honor their obligations.
The Clinton administration has rightly made discouraging nuclear proliferation one of its top priorities. But flexing American power, whether through bombing Iraqi weapons labs or testing missile defenses, will not suffice. Also needed is a stronger international consensus to discourage any new development of nuclear weapons and to dismantle more of those that now exist.
A conference that opens at the United Nations today offers an opportunity. The recent flurry of nuclear treaty ratifications by Russia's Parliament, including the approval of the nuclear Test Ban Treaty, sets a positive tone for the conference. A coalition of non-nuclear nations, including Mexico, South Africa and Ireland, is calling for American ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, unwisely rejected by the Senate last year. The coalition also seeks further weapons cuts by Washington and Moscow and adding Britain, France and China to future talks.
A constructive outcome would commit the nuclear-weapons states to negotiate further reductions and would work out arrangements for tougher, more intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It would also renew efforts to bring the four remaining holdout nations into the nonproliferation treaty. Three of these -- India, Pakistan and Israel -- are capable of producing nuclear weapons. The other is Cuba.
After this week's opening speeches, including one by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the conference will settle down to four weeks of hard diplomatic work. An effective international consensus on proliferation issues will not come easily. But establishing one would impart a new and necessary urgency to the challenge of curbing nuclear weapons, thereby reducing the risks of nuclear war.
-------- us politics
Bush's reform agenda
April 24, 2000
Donald Lambro
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/commentary-2000424165242.htm
... Or how about his plan to accelerate the development and deployment of an anti-missile system to protect the United States against an accidental or terrorist nuclear attack. Mr. Reagan's visionary idea of a strategic defense shield, ridiculed by liberals as technologically impossible and unnecessary, would become a reality under Mr. Bush's proposal. Mr. Bush ... has said repeatedly that he intends to spend the bulk of his political capital on getting these proposals enacted by Congress.